SoftBank Corp. provides Japan-based mobile communications services, mobile device sales, fixed-line communications, and ISP services, with more than 80 million users nationwide. The company also provides a variety of solutions for enterprises, including data centers, cloud, security, global, artificial intelligence (AI), IoT, and digital marketing services.
Supporting Data Access to Achieve Data-Driven Innovation
Due to the spread of COVID-19, demand for digital services has increased at SoftBank. With new revenue streams and more varied operational structures of business units, it was imperative for SoftBank to move to a scalable data platform, where they could have a reliable, single source of information. Cloudera Data Platform (CDP) will enable SoftBank to increase resources flexibly as needed and adjust resources to meet business needs.
New Data Lakehouse Enables Stronger Data Governance
SoftBank needed to reduce the number of workloads on its existing platform and decided to adopt Cloudera to build a data lake capable of managing data more effectively. Team members with various Cloudera capabilities provided 24-hour support for upgrade. Cloudera’s Professional Services team and Solution Engineers worked together with SoftBank’s team, which ultimately resulted in a successful migration process.
The data lake will function as a reliable, single information source from which different business units can extract actionable insights, and as a centralized data management platform tohelp eliminate data silos, optimize costs and maximize operational efficiency.
Previously, SoftBank was only able to handle batch processing, but since the migration, they can now run different workloads with different use cases and analyses in real-time. In addition, by adding analytical capabilities for real-time processing, SoftBank has succeeded in reducing the time to value, acccelerating their impact on the business. .
With more users accessing data, the ability to secure and manage data, such as sensitive customer data in on-premise environments, becomes a higher priority. CDP enables SoftBank to set user access guidelines and adjust variables such as granularity and location. In addition, it has functions to review and update user access controls regularly as part of data governance.
SoftBank Aims to Expand Data Provision Further for Users and Corporate Customers
The introduction of CDP has strengthened SoftBank’s business for both users and corporate customers. With more data from all points of contact with customers, telecommunications carriers can now execute a continuous loop of planning and verification and personalize targeted offers to improve the customer experience.
At the same time, telecommunications carriers’ user location data that has been aggregated, anonymized, and processed is converted into data products that are then provided to business customers. SoftBank aims to expand its data applicationss across a variety of industries by leveraging the huge volume of data collected from its broad user base.
Yoichi Aki of SoftBank’s Data Strategy Department, IT & Architect Division, Technology Unit, said:
“As we look for ways to expand possible services and provide new value to our customers while protecting users’ confidential data, the amount of data we manage with our abundant capabilities continues to grow. For this reason, we have come to recognize the need for a modern data architecture that enables us to align our data strategy with our business goals. We believe these new data analysis capabilities will boost what we can offer to our customers.”
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