Deeper Customer Insights and Reduced TCO Through GCP Analytics for the Telegraph Media Group

Client

The Telegraph Media Group (TMG) is an award-winning, multimedia news brand that has been synonymous with quality, authority, and credibility for more than 160 years.

Challenges

As data-driven organizations focus on improving business agility, they are constantly challenged towards a dual mandate of ensuring faster availability of data, while reducing the overall cost of ownership. The CIO/CDO/CTO organizations are challenged to find innovative and cost-effective solutions that deliver better quality of insights at a much faster pace as demanded by business groups and external partners in the enterprise ecosystem. They are on the lookout for removing hard dependencies on legacy platforms, which have limited scalability, flexibility, and agility, with an ever increasing spend to enhance and maintain.

TMG was looking for near real-time data for improved decisions. However, the legacy architecture constrained the turnaround time for enabling data to business as well as increased the total cost of ownership due to significant spending on license. Data availability for critical business consumption was gradually getting impacted, resulting in delayed or incorrect decisions.

• The key solution construct was to adopt native GCP services to enable near real-time data publishing for business decision-making, thereby eliminating the need for legacy ETL tools, thus enabling the dual benefits of faster time to insight at lower costs.
•  Analytical Data Pipelines were developed on GCP to enable internal customers, such as Customer Engagement Center teams and the Insights & Analytics, group to report better on customer and subscription metrics on organizational dashboards.

LTM Solution

The solution included building a cloud-based analytics pipeline on a versatile platform on BigQuery, Cloud SQL, Composer, and GKE. Dockerized Python code on GKE was developed to feed the required data from PubSub into the database. Google Data Studio was used for reports, advanced visualizations, and exploration. Google Native pipelines were built for continuous integration & deployment.

Benefits

5X faster availability of customer subscription metrics for Customer Engagement Center teams and significant lower TCO achieved.

“At The Telegraph, we migrated and optimized our business-critical data and workloads to Google Cloud. With the expanded availability and expertise of LTM consultants, we were able to quickly deploy and manage those applications. LTM team worked with The Telegraph as one and has been definitely a great asset for us,” Justyna Owczarek, Head of Technology - Data