Fishbowl Deploys MapR to Provide Customer Engagement Platform for Restaurant Industry

MapR Technologies, Inc., provider of the industry’s only Converged Data Platform, today announced that Fishbowl, the leading customer engagement platform provider for the restaurant industry, is using the MapR Converged Data Platform with Apache Drill as the foundation of its multi-tenant software as a service (SaaS) solution, for analytic data storage, transformation and interactive end-user analytics interfaces.

Fishbowl empowers restaurants to engage in a more intelligent, relevant and effective manner by enabling them to understand their guests’ desires, preferences and needs. More than 70,000 restaurant locations rely on Fishbowl’s platform, experts and strategic partnerships to improve brand preference and amplify same-store sales.

With mounting requirements for scalability and the need to support growing varieties and volumes of data along with daily data refresh, Fishbowl needed a solution to achieve the desired performance levels and zero downtime.  Ingesting and aggregating data from multiple disparate sources, Fishbowl wanted to provide a comprehensive view of restaurant guests to its clients at a lower total cost of ownership, ensuring affordable scalability.

Fishbowl developed a robust data and analytics infrastructure leveraging the MapR Converged Data Platform, which includes the SQL query engine Apache Drill, enabling self-service data exploration on big data. MapR-FS, part of the MapR Platform, is also used to support multi-tenancy and drive unique tenant-level data isolation in Fishbowl’s big data SaaS environment.  Further, MapR delivers superior read/write performance for Fishbowl’s platform.  As a result, the solution is faster and more scalable, and offers a unified analytics and future proof platform to account for new data sets continuously being identified.

Using the MapR platform, Fishbowl gained significant savings on license and storage costs, spending approximately one tenth on licenses and one third on storage, resulting in the ability to deliver a scalable big data platform at a reasonable price point. In addition, Fishbowl’s interactive query speed increased by 5-10X of competitive products, enabling clients to gain guest insights faster. By leveraging the MapR multi-tenancy and security infrastructure, Fishbowl was able to increase time to market, delivering the platform one quarter earlier than expected.

“Fishbowl enables restaurant brands to grow through superior understanding of and deeper engagement with guests. The platform empowers restaurant operators with rich data insights to engage guests with greater efficacy and understand the impact of their marketing efforts,” said Parijat Jauhari,  vice president, analytics and product management, Fishbowl. “With MapR, Fishbowl offers the performance, scalability and near real-time capabilities required to provide a comprehensive view of the guest, which is critical to intelligent marketing in today’s competitive landscape.”

"MapR is helping companies around the globe rapidly transform how they do business through application of the world’s only Converged Data Platform. Our customers realize tremendous value and competitive advantage by utilizing analytics in real-time to have an immediate impact on business outcomes," said David Cross, chief marketing officer, MapR Technologies. "Trailblazers like Fishbowl are putting technology and data to work, enabling restaurants to maximize performance from their operations. We're excited to play a role in this kind of industry transformation."