Coca-Cola uses Splunk for data-driven insight

'Without data you're just a person with an opinion,' Coca-Cola's senior platform architect tells delegates at splunk.conf 2014

Coca-Cola is using operational intelligence platform Splunk as part of an initiative to ensure that decisions are data-driven at the company.

Michael Connor, senior platform architect at The Coca-Cola Company, told delegates at splunk.conf 2014 in Las Vegas today that the organisation needed to base its decisions on data because "without data you're just a person with an opinion".

He said one of the hardest things for any organisation is understanding how much data it needs to process and analyse, and even when it does it can be hard to obtain the data because of what he called "data cartels" within organisations that hold the data for ransom.

"Ninety per cent of our time is spent trying to get the data," Conner said.

The key reason to gain more data for analysis is to make more informed decisions, but this, Connor said, has been hampered by business intelligence tools that have been limited by what data they can extract.

He said that end users "have to free the 'data lake'". A data lake differs from a data warehouse because it can contain unstructured data in addition to structured data.

"I think filling up that data lake is daunting - it has been for us. But there is light at the end of the tunnel."

Connor said that cloud and automation has been a "game changer" for Coca-Cola, and advised companies to build their cloud automation strategies with a data lake in mind, because then it will be able to collect more data - or "fill the data lake" - for analysis.

Coca-Cola decided to move all its IT infrastructure to Amazon Web Services (AWS) at the end of 2013.

"We were going to automate everything we have and as a result we have achieved an 80 per cent reduction in tickets and 40 per cent operational savings," Connor explained.

The shift to AWS was completed in six months and enabled the firm to get hold of more data.

For example, Coca-Cola can now extract data from its vending machines, social media and loyalty programmes, all of which feed into the Splunk data platform.

It can then build dashboards, allowing its users to get a better view of the data.

Connor gave one example in which Splunk was used to correlate spikes in sales to weekly Walking Dead viewing parties at college campuses.

"We noticed that in vending machines on college campuses, right before the Walking Dead episodes, people were [buying our] drinks," he said.

Conner added that every time a consumer pushes a button on Coca-Cola's Freestyle Machines, 100 bytes of data goes into Splunk.

The company also downloaded a security add-on feature in order to monitor behaviour and help to create anti-fraud dashboards.

Overall, Connor explained that he was happy with Splunk's solution because it is "a very hackable platform". He said that Coca-Cola would be looking at other big data vendors in the future, but suggested that Splunk would continue to be used for operational intelligence because it was an "all-in-one solution".