Business context
DPG Media is a leading media group with activities in Belgium, the Netherlands and Denmark. DPG Media owns several popular brands in newspapers & magazines (Het Laatste Nieuws, De Morgen, Humo), radio & television (QMusic, VTM) and online services.
DPG Media has the ambition to become the local leader in the media landscape and therefore decided years ago to make the full switch to cloud, to invest in mobile and digital products with HLN Mobile and VTM GO, the Flemish Netflix as an example. Advanced analytics powered by artificial intelligence and machine learning are an instrumental tool for DPG to continuously improve customer experience of its media products.
Scope & objectives
Since our partnership's inception, Data Minded has been a valued collaborator of the data lake team. Together, we've empowered the entire organization to develop self-service use cases for data analytics. Our joint efforts resulted in the successful implementation of Datafy as a managed data engineering platform.
Our responsibilities encompass the maintenance of the central data platform, spanning infrastructure and workflow management, as well as the seamless delivery of data products, data science workbenches, and reporting tools to the entire organization. Furthermore, we oversee the ingestion and processing of substantial batch and streaming data sources, including CRM, clickstream, advertising, sales, and marketing data. Data Minded also offers guidance and training in data architecture.
The platform's technology stack primarily comprises open-source software components, including Scala, Python, Airflow, EKS Kubernetes, CodeBuild/CodePipeline, Terraform, Gradle, Kafka, Elasticsearch, and more, all hosted on the AWS cloud.
Key results
Within one year, 600+ users (scientists and engineers) were on-boarded, 50+ use cases went live; 2800 projects have started; 60+ data sources were connected.
This degree of adoption was only possible by rethinking the way of working:
Harmonising processes and tools across Belgium and the Netherlands,
Cloud migration,
Managed cloud-native data engineering platform,
A central data repository for all teams for data discovery, data governance and data sharing.
Impact
DPG Media & Data Minded succeeded in creating a complete 360° view of its customers by combining both online and offline data to provide personalised recommendations for their media products.
In addition, rethinking the way of working improved operational efficiency, reduced legacy and thus improved costs.