The big data wave is transforming businesses across the world and forcing organizations of all kinds to upgrade their offerings in an effort to remain competitive. In today’s digital age, that means every business needs an impressive web presence, great user experience, competitive rates, and streamlined analytics if they hope to outperform cloud-native entities.

With the General Data Protection Regulation going into effect for any business with European operations in May 2018, keeping these processes safe and reliable, as well as attractive, to customers is more important than ever.

“The internet is full of competition. … People have all the freedom to choose whoever they want to play with. … Pentaho … is our … process to get a 360 view of the customer,” said Reni Waegelein (pictured), information and communications technology manager of Veikkaus Oy. Veikkaus Oy is Finland’s government-operated gambling organization, and Waegelein and his team are using Pentaho to ensure a smooth, modern service for its customers.

Waegelein spoke with Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and Rebecca Knight (@knightrm), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the PentahoWorld event in Orlando, Florida. They discussed Veikkaus Oy’s journey as a government entity utilizing Pentaho and what the company hopes to achieve with the platform in the future. (* Disclosure below.)

Utilizing data for social good

Veikkaus Oy operates all money gaming in Finland, from casinos to lotteries to sports and horse betting, and uses earnings to support efforts toward the greater good. “In Finland, we have 5.4 million inhabitants, and we sell only to 18+ year-old people. At the moment, we have more than 2 million registered customers,” Waegelein said.

The vast amount of data those customers generate is used by Veikkaus Oy primarily in promoting services and games through targeted ads, but the company also looks at customer behavior to identify problematic gambling patterns. “Gaming is a two-edged sword. … It does cause problems, so we use the data to try to identify the bad patterns when somebody is about to lose control,” Waegelein said.

Protecting users against compulsive gaming behaviors is a crucial aspect of Veikkaus Oy’s responsibility, and Pentaho helps the company predict and act against these patterns by shifting targeted ads to targeted suggestions for taking a break from the service. The platform enables overall efforts to take advantage of customer data, captured primarily at Veikkaus Oy’s company-built slot machines and other edge devices.

“We [have] a Kafka Hadoop area where we collect everything. Then there’s Pentaho doing the extract, transform, and load work, and we store all the data that goes through it to … HP’s Vertica,” Waegelein said.

Looking ahead, Waegelein hopes Pentaho will enhance real-time processing capabilities to dovetail with the behavioral research Veikkaus Oy does to serve customers with a range of sensitive needs. The company is also working to solve the issue of card counting and other system-gaming tricks by using the platform.

“We work with psychologists to understand this. … You have to know how people behave,” he said. In the meantime, Waegelein is grateful for a reliable system that keeps processes smooth and customers happy.

“Every week there’s somebody who wins,” he concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of PentahoWorld. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for PentahoWorld. Neither Hitachi Vantara Corp., the event sponsor, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE