Enhance Customer Experience Using Real-time Motion Insights from IoT and Wi-Fi Data with Datumize and Informatica

Learn how the integration between Datumize Data Collector (DDC) and Informatica Data Engineering Streaming (DES) allows companies to enjoy valuable and timely insights about movements inside their facilities.

This blog is co-authored by Nacho Lafuente, Founder & CEO, Datumize.

In recent years, location-based analytics has opened the door to a new competitive intelligence for companies in different verticals. From logistics to hospitality, airports, amusement parks, and even smart cities, understanding how people and assets move in certain areas or facilities is key to analyzing operations or customer behavior. In fact, from the variety of segments included in the indoor location and positioning market, location-based analytics is forecasted to experience major growth. It’s becoming an increasing need for companies to use this knowledge to improve their efficiency and their customer experience.

The challenge

The proliferation of mobility sensors and Internet of Things (IoT) assets is one of the levers boosting the growth of motion intelligence solutions. But at the same time, these types of sensor-based solutions are preventing the adoption of motion intelligence in some verticals where the extension, number, and diversity of facilities makes sensorization projects complex or even unfeasible. In addition, besides the struggle of data collection, we must consider that transforming motion data into real-time business and operational insights is not straightforward at all. As a result, these companies experience a gap in their intelligence: motion data.

That’s the reason why Datumize, a software vendor delivering data integration products with its primary goal of at getting actionable insights based on “dark data” (data not stored and therefore not used), and Informatica, the leader in Enterprise Cloud Data Management developing innovative solutions for streaming data management, have joined forces to leverage unexplored data and transform it into real-time insights.

The solution

In the Internet era, Wi-Fi is a ubiquitous technology that is present in almost every facility, either public or private, indoors or outdoors.

The reality is that Wi-Fi is mostly used to provide networking connectivity to access internal systems (i.e., the employee carrying goods inside a warehouse or hotel receptionist) or interact with the Internet (i.e., you in a coffee shop checking your e-mail).

However, the power of Wi-Fi from a data and analytical perspective is beyond the pure wireless networking connectivity. Each Wi-Fi access point (the hardware device that actually is used to connect your endpoint to a wired network) is already generating a huge variety of data that still remains poorly explored. This device contains relevant information on the endpoint device (identified by a MAC address), the signal power (expressed in decibels), and some other deep technical metrics.

This dark data can be used to deliver mobility intelligence to companies. Initially, this motion intelligence can be expressed by locating devices (positioning) and understanding how those devices are moving around (movement); but it’s not limited to those two areas, as more refined insights can be obtained.

Datumize Data Collector (DDC) is a lightweight and high-performance data integration engine that gets data from sophisticated sources such as network transactions, IoT, mobility, and industrial protocols. DDC can capture, cleanse, and ingest data from the Wi-Fi access points in any facility, performing data capture on the edge, filtering (duplicate removal), enrichment, and formatting streamed data. The relevant captured data is then ingested into Informatica Data Engineering Streaming. There, massive amounts of real-time data are parsed, processed, analyzed, and transformed into persisted metrics and insights, following the Informatica sense-reason-act framework.

The benefits

The resulting outcome from this solution is a set of business and technical insights that allow companies to make advanced decisions based on analytical metrics, not perceptions.

For example, in a recent project developed by Datumize and Informatica for the hospitality industry, Wi-Fi data collected from access points in a hotel resort with Datumize Data Collector and transformed into real-time insights with Informatica Data Engineering Streaming helped the resort improve customer experience by:

• Improving staff management. The solution provides a real-time notification into the hotel ERP system whenever there are more people in the restaurant, compared to a previous time slot, that requires to send more staff to cope with customer service.
• Providing real-time customer offers. With the solution, the resort can send a customized offer to a VIP customer, via in-app push notification or email, that fulfills certain requisites and is around a specific area (for instance, a discount for the pool bar, a small gift in the spa, and so on).
• Understanding the real concentration of people. The solution provides an ad hoc dashboard for the hotel manager with a map or graphics showing the number of people by zone (for example, pool, reception, and restaurant) and time. These insights can be used to adjust hotel operations to better match customer needs.

The smooth integration of both technologies delivers an effective end-to-end ingestion and streaming analytics solution to generate relevant and timely technical, business, and operational insights for hotel managers.

The real-time motion insights advantage

The successful combination of Datumize and Informatica technologies has opened an opportunity for companies to enjoy real-time motion insights without installing new hardware or sensors. This solution also sets the foundation for use cases in different verticals, such as hospitality, warehousing, smart cities, airports, and others, where the combination of Datumize Data Collector, for ingesting dark data from network transactions, IoT, mobility or industrial protocols, and Informatica Data Engineering Streaming, for transforming data into real-time insights, provides a new competitive advantage.

Want to learn more about the real-time motion insights solution by Datumize and Informatica? Join this live webinar, “Next-generation customer experience: Harnessing the power of real-time streaming analytics and IoT,” for a deep dive into the solution.