As a part of its technology and marketing partnership with the NCAA, Google Cloud has unveiled an end-to-end analytics architecture and workflow built over the past few months (leveraging Kaggle, BigQuery, and more) to ingest, load, and analyze the NCAA’s decades of data.
In addition to helping the NCAA find more value in their data, this architecture will be producing marketing outputs such as real-time predictive ads during the Final Four of the 2018 NCAA men's college basketball tournament this weekend. This kind of real-time predictive analytics has never been attempted before during a live televised event, according to Google.
In a Google Cloud blog post by Eric Schmidt, developer advocate, Google Cloud and Allen Jarvis, technical account manager, Google Cloud, say the aim with the NCAA collaboration is to help it “see the value in their data across the 90 championships and 24 sports” that it administers.
“Using March Madness as our proving ground, we set out to build a data analytics workflow that could uncover new types of stats, insights, and predictive models to elevate the sophistication of the NCAA’s analytics,” they write. “We also wanted to highlight the importance of proper tooling to enable collaboration across multiple disciplines, including data engineering, data analysis, data science, quantitative analysis, and machine learning. And while basketball is particularly fun to analyze, the architecture and workflow developed here not only serves as a blueprint for other NCAA sports, but can also extend to other industries or domains, such as retail, life sciences, manufacturing, and others.”
Although this scenario uses sports data, Google says that, beyond March Madness, it demonstrates what can be achieved by applying cloud technology to data for all organizations.
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