With so many impactful and innovative projects being carried out by our customers using the Cloudera platform, selecting the winners of our annual Data Impact Awards (DIA) is never an easy task. Not ones to shy away from a challenge, our expert judges have deliberated and combed through the finalist entries, identifying the customers who are leading industry change and inspiring peers with their data achievements.
For the second year running, we announced the winners to a global audience via a virtual ceremony. And this year has seen some truly remarkable work put forward. Every one of our 22 finalists is utilizing cloud technology to push next-generation data solutions to benefit the everyday people who need it most – across industries including science, health, financial services and telecommunications. Given the way we have seen communities and workplace cultures come together and stand for change over what has been a disruptive 20 months, we are proud to introduce the People First category to the 2021 DIA. Our way of recognizing the organizations at the forefront of pushing for diversity, equity and inclusion in and outside of the workplace.
Our winners were selected by a group of 26 industry experts made up of analysts, influences and members of the media. So, without further ado, it is with great delight that we officially publish the 2021 Data Impact Award winners!
Data Lifecycle Connection
With a continuously growing clientele, Carrefour looked to unify two legacy systems to help improve the customization of its customer offering and the scalability of its business. By adopting a custom developed application based on the Cloudera ecosystem, Carrefour has combined the legacy systems into one platform which provides access to customer data in a single data lake. This allows for an omni-channel view of the customer and enables real-time data streaming and a safe zone to test machine learning models using Cloudera Data Science Workbench (CDSW). The technology switch has fundamentally changed the way Carrefour interacts with its customers, improving the performance of its offer campaigns and better serving customer needs. Now, Carrefour can tailor coupon offers to its customers with ease. This means that clients receive customized coupon offers in real-time, handling around 3.5M transactions per day and processing information at a rate of 1k events per second.
Cloud Innovation
As a longtime player in the energy industry, ExxonMobil has 100 years of data and learnings scattered across millions of digital records. The variety of formats, unstructured nature, and dispersed location of these documents present several challenges for critical business decisions. To enable faster and easier access to millions of documents, ExxonMobil combined domain specific knowledge and a combination of Cloudera tools with cloud services. This included using NiFi to automatically collect and centralize documents consisting of unstructured data and then leveraging advanced natural language processing to extract tacit knowledge and perform sentiment analysis on unstructured text and images from more than 20 million documents. Business users can now quickly locate relevant documents to their search topic and see subject specific sentiment across those results to help form or challenge a position. As documents are reviewed to further validate the extracted sentiment, feedback is cycled back into the system for continual improvement. This dramatically reduces the time to formulate data driven decisions, while significantly increasing the amount of data that forms those decisions, allowing ExxonMobil to operate safely, responsibly, and efficiently.
Data for Enterprise AI
The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is a bureau of the U.S. Department of Treasury that helps taxpayers meet their tax responsibilities and enforces tax law. It deals with all U.S. taxpayer details and needs to quickly analyze petabytes of data across hundreds of servers. Being unable to analyze data in real-time makes it harder for the IRS to identify fraud in real time. And with petabytes of data, both time and cost were significant barriers to analysis. Failure to address this meant major implications for the IRS and the taxpayer. Cloudera joined forces with NVIDIA to develop a new capability to accelerate Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) operations on petabyte-scale datasets using GPUs. The solution implemented the Cloudera Data Platform (CDP) to better support high-performance computing. The IRS became the first customer to utilize the combined technology which integrates the Cloudera Data Platform (CDP) and NVIDIA’s RAPIDS Accelerator for Apache Spark 3.0. In doing so, the IRS has achieved remarkable outcomes, including improving the speed of data analysis by 8x and halving infrastructure costs. As a result, the bureau has cut down on fraudulent activity, and the efficiency savings benefit both the government and taxpayers.
Security & Governance Leadership
As a bank that understands the future of financial services as data-driven, Bank of the West chose to adopt the Cloudera platform as the linchpin of its digital transformation. In doing so, Bank of the West has modernized and centralized its Big Data platform in just one year. This new platform allows for data governance and protection in line with sector compliance, alongside advanced analytics, which boosts the organization’s ability to develop data models to improve sales and marketing. The Cloudera technology has also enabled Bank of the West to experiment and scale faster. This, in turn, has had a positive impact on innovation and decision-making aimed at improving customer services and reporting.
Industry Transformation
To aid in Africa’s digital transformation, MTN is driving a strategy called Ambition 2025 across all 21 of its independent operating companies in Africa and the Middle East. As part of this, MTN needed to leverage new technologies to support real-time decision-making, store new data types and provide AI capabilities at scale. MTN deployed a unified data lake, featuring a new data and analytics platform named EVA (Enterprise Value through Analytics), built in partnership with Cloudera and LigaData. EVA unifies data from MTN’s different operator systems, creating a 360° view of subscribers. With thousands of data points gathered about a particular subscriber, MTN can now provide better services and products aligned to customer needs. This has led to a significant increase in upsell, cross-sell, and subscriber retention for the business. In turn, MTN’s new capabilities to better utilize and analyze performance data have made improvements that increase cell coverage and its Net Promoter Score while decreasing customer turnover and drop calls. This is an industry change that is truly, allowing customers to experience more connected lives.
People First
As with many industries, the COVID-19 pandemic presented several challenges for Bank Mandiri; most significantly, it caused a higher potential for disruption to needed financial services as well as higher risk to bank staff. To help combat the financial pitfalls during these turbulent times for both its staff and customers, the Bank decided to utilize the Cloudera Data Science Workbench (CDSW) to provide agile banking solutions that were more adaptable, flexible, and quicker at making decisions. With dashboards powered by CDSW, Bank Mandiri can achieve insights from numerous data sources that streamline banking operations and allow faster customer care. These dashboards help the bank monitor its branches, tracking data such as footfall, volume and value of transactions, frequency of transactions, as well as the changes in geographic zones designated by the government as high or low risks. And with these insights Bank Mandiri can dynamically open or close branches as needed and proactively inform customers and staff accordingly. With such an agile response, customers can transact with minimal disruptions and get access to financial services, without putting employees at risk.
Data for Good
Determined to be an enabler of the Philippines’ bid to be a G20 country by 2050, UnionBank is on a mission to power the future of banking to best serve the growing needs of Filipinos everywhere – especially the underbanked and unbanked. Data scientists and departments across UnionBank worked together to further leverage tools in Cloudera Data Science Workbench (CDSW) to increase financial inclusion and improve risk management with enhanced, AI-powered credit scoring and risk models. The project has enabled the bank to manage risk better and offer loans and credit to a broader range of individuals and small businesses, effectively doubling its loan approval rate. Now, with a robust data infrastructure and data culture at its core, UnionBank is better positioned than ever to provide much needed financial lifelines to its customers amidst the uncertainty of the pandemic economy.
Learn more about the Cloudera Data Impact Awards and see past winners!
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