Retail, Ecommerce & Consumer Products
Romania
Founded in 2001, eMAG is a pioneer of Eastern European online retail with a presence in Romania, Bulgaria, and Hungary. Its online marketplace offers a variety of items, including electronics, home appliances, fashion, personal care products, and more. As eMAG cements its position as an e-commerce leader, it constantly invests in technology to provide customers with better shopping experiences every day.
Scaling to meet Black Friday data demands
Data is fundamental to eMAG’s business, with a 14-person team overseeing the company’s data platform, supporting business functions from finance and marketing to the supply chain. Like many online retailers, Black Friday is a huge event for eMAG, with the company selling almost as much in a single day as it would in a standard month. This demand meant eMAG needed to scale its data platform to support massive volumes of e-commerce data and provide its senior managers with the insight they need to make real-time pricing and promotion decisions.
Driving insight and value from eMAG’s growing data became a challenge, due to its increasingly fragmented landscape. Its data team was spending a significant amount of time just building data sets and integrating different tools, which detracted from their ability to deliver business insight. As a result, eMAG is set on modernizing its data and analytics landscape.
“Cloudera is a great platform for integrating data together in one place. It ensures we have high-quality and accurate data that is available for our business users whenever they need it,” said Georgiana Conete, Data Platform Manager, eMAG.
Bringing order to data with Apache Iceberg
Using Cloudera, eMAG has built a centralized data lakehouse, which stores close to two petabytes of data. A key requirement for eMAG was having an enterprise-grade, secure data platform that would support the latest open-source technologies. Additionally, eMAG wanted the flexibility to move certain on-premises workloads to the public cloud in the future.
eMAG worked closely with Cloudera Professional Services throughout the implementation as it expanded its cluster from the initial proof of concept through to production. This collaboration minimized downtime and ensured all of eMAG’s data workloads were working on the new platform.
As part of its data strategy, eMAG had been looking for an open tabular format, so Cloudera’s native integration with Apache Iceberg really stood out. Apache Iceberg has enabled eMAG to share and maintain all of its data in a much more consistent manner and optimized how the data team supports different lines of business. In addition, eMAG can now easily query its data tables using Iceberg’s time travel functionality to see how and when data has changed.
“Cloudera’s platform gives us the flexibility to experiment with and iterate our data in a secure manner. The integration with Apache Iceberg also means we can query large data sets without negatively impacting performance,” commented Conete.
Optimizing sales with real-time decision-making
Previously eMAG processed information in Qlik applications and pre-aggregated some data in a MS SQL data warehouse. Now with Cloudera, it can aggregate all its different data sets and present this information in real-time via customized dashboards. This approach provides senior managers with a variety of insights, from sales and promotions performance, to where website traffic is coming from and overall operational efficiency. Today, eMAG can process data ten times faster using Cloudera than previously.
eMAG now has a robust and scalable platform to support future growth and data innovation. In addition, Cloudera offers eMAG a trusted foundation for AI-ready data, as its observability capabilities provide end-to-end visibility into how data is being processed and curated before it is used in AI models.
Want to see where it all began? Explore the original customer story here.
