Expanding the retail customer view with graph analytics on HPE Superdome Flex

[ComputeExperts]

Identifying actionable behavior patterns is critical for retailers. And graph analytics provides a solution. Learn how you can take advantage of the technology with this offering from Trovares and HPE.

Customer insight has never been more important to retailers than it is today. As discussed in my recent blog on retail digital transformation, the pandemic changed consumer habits and created difficult supply chain challenges. During the months when retail stores had to close, many customers discovered the convenience of online shopping. And when retailers launched new online shops and home delivery services to meet the growing demand, the shift from traditional to digital retailing accelerated further.

Consumers are also more fickle today. They can quickly compare many options in terms of price, speed, and customer satisfaction, and that makes consumer loyalty harder to win.

The most competitive retailers are using data to understand and engage customers on a deeper, more personal level. Insight-driven retail businesses are more able to anticipate customers’ needs and meet them quickly. How can you do the same?

Graph analytics is a valuable way to build 360-degree customer views using massive and complex datasets, faster and easier than when done using relational databases. HPE and Trovares, creator of the high-performance graph analytics platform Trovares xGT, have co-engineered a solution that provides accelerated time to insight and improves productivity, which is ideal for retail customer insights and a host of other use cases.

What is graph analytics? 

Graph analytics is a technology that speeds and simplifies the exploration of relationships between large volumes of data—so you can easily trace complex relationships between entities such as your customers, transactions, products, suppliers, and more.

Instead of storing data in tables like a relational database, graph analytics uses a graph—which is a collection of nodes and the relationships that connect them. The relationship connection between two nodes is called an edge. Nodes are easily manipulated and allow for unlimited connections (edges) within the data. And when combined with artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), graph analytics can be used to analyze thousands of data sources with millions or billions of elements.

So, with graph analytics you can identify and show patterns more visually and run deeper analytics than with any relational database.

Transform retail customer views with HPE and Trovares 

If you are looking for a proven analytics solution, you should consider the co-engineered joint graph analytics offering from Trovares and HPE.

Trovares xGT is a unique property-graph compute engine that makes tougher queries possible and delivers results with incredible speed. It’s designed to support extremely large in-memory graphs, and provides tools to help you make insights and discover value out of large-scale complex data sets. You can benefit from near linear scalability and a high degree of parallelism when the engine can tap into large pools of memory.

Which brings us to HPE Superdome Flex servers, built to handle the most demanding mission-critical workloads and delivers an unmatched combination of scalability, performance, reliability, and security for enterprise environments of any size. With up to 24 TB of shared memory in the Superdome Flex 280 server and up to 48 TB of shared memory in the Superdome Flex server, and with the power of Intel® Xeon® processors, HPE and Trovares bring new levels of performance, scalability, and simplicity to graph analytics:

• Performance –On Superdome Flex, all processes access shared memory within a single operating system image and can read and write memory at internal system speeds, with no network latency. Search queries are handled hundreds of times faster than conventional graph tools.
• Simplicity – On Superdome Flex, you don’t have to break a graph across multiple nodes, distribute data structures, or reassemble data sets. Data scientists and analysts can probe terabyte-scale data from a single interface.
• Scalability – HPE and Trovares xGT achieve near linear scalability to mitigate data growth challenges. Simply add more servers to create one larger server that is capable of running larger workloads.

The HPE Superdome Flex family also allows you to start small and grow with your business needs. For smaller environments, HPE Superdome Flex 280 scales from two to eight sockets. For larger environments, HPE Superdome Flex can scale to 32 sockets, enabling you to meet large graph analytics needs.

Enhanced customer insights and more 

Trovares xGT on HPE Superdome Flex can help you meet retail business challenges around customer loyalty and anticipating changing customer needs.

With the power to trace and visualize complex relationships between millions or billions of entities, you can create a true 360-degree customer view. You can gain faster access to enhanced customer insights based on a rich understanding of relationships, which can help you make better purchase decisions and become more competitive.

With graph analytics at your disposal, you can also address other business challenges including:

• Social network analysis – build enhanced customer insights and identify key influencers and opinion shapers.
• Fraud detection – deliver a higher level of accuracy with new capabilities to detect and stop fraud in real time.
• Supply chain management – optimize supply chain networks with faster and enhanced insights.

The HPE and Trovares solution also brings value to companies in the financial services, government, telecommunications, energy, and medical research industries.

Putting it to the test 

To prove the capabilities of our joint solution, engineering teams from HPE and Trovares built one of the largest and most complex graphs ever built on a scale-up system – with more than 7 billion nodes and 300 billion edges.  That’s a planetary-scale graph running on a single HPE Superdome Flex!

On an HPE Superdome Flex server with 32 sockets and 24 TB of memory, it took less than 5 minutes to run a degree-distribution query over all 7.1 billion nodes.

You can read the full results and learn much more about Trovares xGT on HPE Superdome Flex, in the brochure—just click below.

• Read the brochure: Deliver advanced insights, faster with graph analytics
• Check out the 2-page brief: Deeper insights with graph analytics
• Contact an HPE representative

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Meet Diana Cortes, HPE Marketing Manager, Data Solutions

Diana has spent the past 24 years working with the technologies that power the world’s most demanding IT environments and is interested in how solutions based on those technologies impact the business. A native from Colombia, Diana holds an MBA from Georgetown University and has held a variety of regional and global roles with HPE in the U.S., the U.K. and Sweden. She is based in Stockholm, Sweden.

Compute Experts
Hewlett Packard Enterprise

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