Original by Amazon Web Services | August 30, 2023
In today’s world, leveraging data analytics to enable precise marketing has become one of the mainstream trends for global businesses. However, the complexity of infrastructure and operational challenges cannot be overlooked. How can businesses effectively build a data analytics platform to support marketing services and achieve mutual growth with their customers?
In the digital marketing era, companies have adopted automated and digital tools to manage and execute marketing campaigns efficiently, resulting in better resource utilization and return on investment. However, effectively managing, analyzing, and utilizing multi-source data is no easy task. ZBANX Technology Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as “ZBANX Technology”), with over 17 years of experience in cross-border e-commerce, proactively tackles this challenge.
How Can Data Analytics Management Keep Up with Rapid Business Growth?
ZBANX Technology is a digital marketing services company established by a renowned team within the cross-border e-commerce sector, catering to brands expanding overseas. Leveraging accumulated practical experience from handling billions in sales, it provides services encompassing omnichannel marketing media sales expertise and comprehensive e-commerce sales strategies. Through influencer marketing, advertising management, and independent website operations, it facilitates sustainable global brand growth. Its proprietary data and technology systems form the core of its services, enabling corporate clients to gain deep insights into industry trends and formulate actionable marketing strategies.
As our client base continues to expand and our globalisation efforts accelerate, alongside the ever-increasing scope of social and video platforms involved in marketing campaigns, ZBANX’s data sources are also growing substantially. There is an urgent need for more efficient methods and a unified platform to manage and analyse data from collaborating online KOLs and transaction data from affiliate platforms.
Seamless migration to build a one-stop big data platform
To eliminate inefficiencies in data transmission between multiple clouds, ensure data consistency, and address complex operational challenges,ZBANX has resolved to migrate all data to Amazon Web Services. By leveraging mature intelligent lakehouse solutions and a suite of managed data management and analytics services in the cloud, the company is building a comprehensive big data platform for its business. This platform harnesses data to empower clients’ marketing efforts and amplify brand outreach:
Amazon RDS managed database services and Amazon Athena’s interactive analytics support mainstream open-source engines and open-source table and file formats respectively. This enables ZBANX to streamline migration efforts and query business data stored within the Amazon S3 data lake directly using familiar SQL statements, without requiring any servers.
The ZBANX technical team leveraged Amazon S3 services to build a data lake in the cloud, delivering the required scale,agility, and reliability for data storage and analysis. During the data migration process, the AWS technical team provided ZBANX with best practice guidance and assistance, and through a series of scripts, helped ZBANX consolidate data from various cloud platforms into AWS.
ZBANX employs Apache Flink, built upon Amazon EMR, as its streaming data engine to perform real-time processing of multi-business data sources. This is integrated with Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose to load real-time data streams into data lakes, data warehouses, and analytics services for utilisation. Concurrently, when constructing applications such as reporting and analytics, the managed Kubernetes service provided by Amazon EKS is utilised to achieve automatic elastic scaling of underlying resources and cost optimisation.
Reduce operational workload by 90% and achieve zero downtime.
After migrating data to Amazon Web Services, ZBANX successfully achieved the following through its intelligent lakehouse solution, which integrates a modern data architecture, scalable data lake, dedicated data services, and security and management capabilities in the cloud:
- Significantly reduce the data management burden on operations teams. AWS’s intelligent lakehouse solution simplifies operational tasks through enhanced scalability, performance monitoring, and unified data analysis and processing. This reduces operational time to one-tenth of previous levels, freeing up more human resources to directly address business requirements.
- Achieving zero downtime. Amazon Web Services features built-in, easily configurable high availability options. A suite of automated monitoring tools promptly detects issues and automatically transfers services to backup hosts during failures, ensuring ZBANX’s operations experience zero interruptions. This enables the company to serve its customers with greater confidence.
- Achieving enhanced security controls and permission allocation. By incorporating the access control and granular permission management capabilities provided by Amazon Identity and Access Management (IAM) into its business data platform, ZBANX has achieved enhanced security controls and permission allocation within its business reporting system.
Amazon Web Services offers several built-in and easy-to-configure high availability options. For example, enabling multi-master support in Amazon EMR provides high availability for applications, with automated monitoring promptly detecting issues. Even in the event of a failure, services can be automatically transferred to a standby host, ensuring ‘zero’ business interruption and allowing us to serve customers with greater confidence.
—— ZBANX Technical Lead, Fang Zhen
As fellow digital-native enterprises, ZBANX not only engages in deep technical collaboration with Amazon Web Services but also fosters extensive exchanges in areas such as corporate culture and innovation mechanisms.
To address the organizational challenges encountered by ZBANX during its rapid business expansion, experts from Amazon Web Services’ Digital Innovation (DI) team delivered a workshop-style session. This comprehensive program featured lectures and hands-on exercises, providing ZBANX’s management team with an in-depth interpretation of Amazon’s leadership principles and its unique management and innovation framework—the “Reverse Work Method.” The workshop offered invaluable insights and methodologies for building organizational culture and establishing innovation mechanisms at the corporate level for ZBANX.
Looking ahead, ZBANX plans to explore further collaborations with Amazon Web Services in the fields of artificial intelligence and machine learning. By leveraging innovative technologies and AI-driven data models, the company aims to better meet the analytical demands of business data. In the realm of customer service, ZBANX also intends to consider building an AI content production center based on Amazon SageMaker services, thereby offering customers a wider range of products and services.
This deep integration of technology and business operations within the cloud not only enables more refined marketing and outcome forecasting but also helps clients uncover additional growth opportunities. ZBANX also plans to collaborate with Amazon Web Services to develop solutions and showcase success stories across multiple domains, including cross-border e-commerce, brand internationalisation, and digital marketing. This partnership aims to enhance clients’ digital management capabilities in brand building, word-of-mouth marketing, and influencer-led product promotion, thereby securing greater traffic resources, brand endorsement, and innovative sales models.
About ZBANX
ZBANX facilitates sustainable global brand growth through influencer marketing, advertising management, and independent website operations. The company connects brands expanding internationally with premium global partners in content creation, marketing, and operations. Delivering results-driven SaaS solutions for overseas marketing—including data analytics, strategic planning, tools, and promotional services—we ensure exceptional products achieve rapid global reach.
