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Online Social Gaming Company Turns to Visual BI to Delve into Data
TDWI.org, By Linda L. Briggs, 07/21/10
With over 230 million users monthly playing its games - including FarmVille and Mafia Wars - Zynga is one of the largest online social gaming developers in the world. In this interview, Ken Rudin, general manager of analytics for Zynga, discusses the challenges Zynga faced in getting meaningful insights to its analysts on several terabytes of game data captured daily - and the data visualization solution the company recently selected.
"I've been in the large data world for a long, long time," Rudin says about his decision to join Zynga last year. "I absolutely love the technical challenge when you get into massive skyscraper-size chunks of data. Plus, I love even more the business value you can get out of having that much data... If you know what questions to ask, you can get some phenomenal answers."
BI This Week: What led to your decision to join Zynga last year?
Ken Rudin: When I was introduced to Zynga through a friend, his introduction was "First, these guys make games so you know it's going to be fun to work there. Second, they have one of the largest data warehouses in the world. It's growing incredibly rapidly and the entire company is essentially run off analytics and insights." That sounded like a perfect fit for me.
What he told me has turned out to be true - we have incredibly high usage of our data throughout the company. On any given day, a very high percentage of our employees are looking at the data and running analytics. Our analysts have a strategic view of how the company works. Our managers ask for real insights daily. Instead of being asked "Can you run this report for me?," the questions are more along the lines of "What should we be doing about our e-mail distribution?" or "Can you take a look at that and give me some recommendations?"
You're running one of the largest data warehouses in the world, aren't you?
Yes. Vertica is our back-end solution; we are the largest Vertica implementation in the world.
What led to the decision to go with Tableau?
I'm a strong believer that the real value of analytics comes from two things. You have to be great at the science of it and you have to be a great communicator. Where analytics fails in most companies is not the science, it's the communication of the results. People come out with tons of data but they don't know how to describe what it really means to the company and, more important, what they should do about it.
I love getting asked the question here, "Can you look into this and come up with a recommendation?" versus, "Can you make this report for me?" The important thing is the data as well as the communication of what it means.
Before Tableau, there were a lot of tables and numbers, but it's very hard to communicate those results. You always needed someone with you to describe what the numbers on the table mean, or to write up long discussions of it.
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