Building a Reactive Product, Ground Up

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Technology

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Introduction

NashTech worked with Decooda to build a homegrown plugin-based big data platform using a Scala Ecosystem.

Decooda provides industry-leading solutions which support analysis of all types and volumes of social media, research, and enterprise data to uncover the whole story behind the big data in real-time. The integrated big data convergence platform, cognitive-linguistic text analytics engine, and community analytics model shop streamline the convergence and analysis of all social, enterprise, and third-party data. Everyone in the organisation who has a shared interest in the voice of the customer has access to one flexible, easy-to-use platform that improves all aspects of market research, marketing, and 1:1 consumer engagement.

The challenge

Decooda started with an idea on how it would like to mine all the social data in the world, which includes regular streams like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc., but also other data sources like blog feeds, articles, board messages, custom flat files, etc. and provide cognitive analytics to the market research groups. These could be independent groups or research analysts within an organisation. The challenge was to build this story with a homegrown data pipeline and workflow on a home-designed big data platform.

The solution

NashTech started as and continues to be the sole engineering team of Decooda, who took the product from an idea to fruition. We built a homegrown big data platform plugin-based to allow various jobs to be executed in parallel. We worked closely with the cognitive analysts and other PhDs at Decooda to create a tangible semantic analysis plugin. While there could be semantic analysis happening on one portion of the product, there could be DNA folding on the other. The product was built entirely on the Scala Ecosystem.

The outcome

Currently, there are organisations in the media, consumer durables, retailers, soft drink companies, and well-known marketing companies which use the product to strategise and build on the insights generated by the product. Decooda has grown from an idea to a multi-million dollar organisation. The product has won several awards, including the Insight innovation award and KM award 2013, and has been covered in the national media.