Founded in 2014 in Taipei City, Taiwan, Neuftek Co., Ltd., applies big data to understand customers’ DNA. Neuftek provides marketing advisory polls and data services in real time on neuftek.com via a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model. The firm of 10 employees competes locally against OpView in Taiwan and globally against Google Profs. Leveraging IDOL, a proven search and analytics platform, Neuftek draws meaning and relevance from structured and unstructured data.
Cofounders Vincent Chang and Jason Zheng noticed several issues that prompted them to adopt IDOL for their data analytical services. Companies were unable to discover contextual information, process files in various formats, and derive insight from rich media. Neuftek sought to enable these capabilities, particularly social and digital marketing intelligence. The firm also wanted to implement a single platform on which to collect, index, and analyze video, audio, and text data.
Neuftek chose IDOL over Solr/Lucene and IBM Watson software. “We have a lot of confidence in IDOL, which is a strong tool with a very intuitive user interface,” says Zheng, Chief Technology Officer at Neuftek. “We launched the platform without any customization, which is great for customers who don’t have professional end users on staff. Our customers provide the data and API (application programming interface) to use, and we enable access to our community media observation platform for real-time analytics. Time is gold, right?”
Useful for Neuftek data scientists are the software’s data collection connectors, along with robust search capabilities supporting text, Boolean, and conceptual queries. IDOL indexes up to 250 million documents in Neuftek’s environment with enterprise-worthy speeds.
“We adopted a powerful search engine to operate big data with heavy I/O performance that lessens query time,” declares Chang, Neuftek’s General Manager. “Data refresh rates are as short and quick as possible.”
The scale of Neuftek’s virtual machine resources totals more than 50 nodes so the firm has sufficient analysis computing power for unstructured data and local data to serve its clients.
Zheng mentions that the IDOL platform offers supreme stability and scalability while executing a plethora of queries. “IDOL is the first and best choice for stability and scalability in handling large amounts of information,” he says.
Additionally, the solution’s support for multiple languages, notably Chinese, helps Neuftek and its customers determine the sentiment of content linguistically and statistically.
“We obtain accurate assessments of sentiment and emotion analytics in Chinese, which are big challenges,” Chang says. “The ability to process information in multiple languages on one platform is beneficial because many Taiwan customers need to research articles in Chinese, English, and other languages.”
Neuftek is planning to expand into Hong Kong, Singapore, and Shenzhen in China as its SaaS service supports multiple languages and is easily implemented without geographical limitations.
Neuftek customers are improving their operations with fast reporting and analytics. For example, an athletic shoe manufacturer reduced report generation time and manual effort by 50 percent, while accelerating report frequency, which fosters better decisions.
Another Neuftek customer previously employed 30 persons to research Internet content with the Google search engine. “After they used our solution, they only needed 15 people. They did not cut manpower because they can get more business,” explains Chang.
At an OEM manufacturer, 12 employees across six departments monitored consumer responses and related product activities on the Internet. After using Neuftek’s solution with IDOL, the company reduced research time by four to eight hours and one employee now handles all of the research.
Rich, practical functions within IDOL save the company 50 percent on the cost and time normally spent customizing functions on other software. Also, Neuftek’s analytical platform is five times faster in the same query configuration compared to local competitor OpView.
“I can guarantee that with the same hardware, software, and volume of data, IDOL is faster than any other platform or solution. That’s without question,” Zheng states.
Operating a small technology company, Chang is understandably sensitive to costs, but he is thrilled with the Micro Focus platform cost profile. “Total cost of ownership was an important consideration in choosing the solution,” he says. “IDOL is stable and does not give us any trouble, so we hardly spend any money on maintenance.”
More revenue opportunities will come as Neuftek helps various groups discover critical insight. In fact, a potential opportunity may be on the horizon based on the company’s latest political analysis. For a recent Kuomintang of China election, Neuftek personnel used IDOL to analyze public opinions on the Internet about election issues and major candidates. They accurately predicted the winner.
In summary Chang says, “We may sell our solution to the government. They can use it to determine whether or not people accept certain political initiatives before they go into effect. This information could prove very helpful.
