CJ Internet scores big with gamers, creates winning products and services with SAS®

CJ Internet is a Korean entertainment company that develops and publishes online games and provides entertainment content accessed through its well-known Netmarble portal. With more than 25 million registered members and about 60 kinds of online games and entertainment services, CJ Internet has achieved an industry first by turning an online game-publishing business into a successful business model. CJ Internet continues to build its business throughout the world, exporting its products and services to Japan, China and the US, in its commitment to becoming a world-class company.

Last year, the organization finished building a system using SAS Enterprise BI Server, which improved the efficiency of new game products and services development by analyzing the basic information of users as well as more than 50 million records of payment information.

The necessity of analyzing customers
As the Korean gaming market continues to grow, competition among service providers has intensified, and CJ Internet needed to make some changes to stay competitive with other companies. It was the leader in the first-person shooter gaming genre, and Netmarble was the biggest seller among game portal sites. Moreover, CJ Internet had the No. 1 game played in Internet communities in Korea for 104 consecutive weeks. However, its competitors had begun investing aggressively into analyzing their customers and users. This led CJ Internet to the realization that analyzing its customers was critical to maintaining its customer base.

Commenting on this issue, the team leader of CJ Internet's Strategic Information Department, Sang-pil Hyun, said, "We were aware of the potential for a crisis; if we didn't understand how to keep our customers from changing services, our growth would soon suffer."

Analyzing the transaction pattern from moment to moment is more important than simply analyzing the customers themselves, he said. In other words, it is critical to understand sales patterns and the relationship between sales and consumption.

CJ Internet decided that it could improve its competitiveness by developing the capacity to make business decisions more rapidly. CJ Internet identified its goal as "securing analysis capability," and created a five-year road map to mark its progress toward achieving this goal. In selecting the tools that would be used to carry out its objectives, the company examined a number of statistical analysis packages that offered financial stability and ease of maintenance.

Mr. Hyun said, "We decided to go with SAS not only for its analytic capabilities, but also for its strong management effects. As we had set strategic goals on securing our analytics capability, we can also use SAS to focus more on the management aspect."

As a result, the company is now quicker and more agile in its decision-making process than ever before, he said.

Analysis time shortened from three days to only one hour
Previously, CJ Internet's information systems were based on a data warehouse, which used a regular type of report in order to identify a problem, where it was coming from, and what was missing. However, it took too long for the requested information to be made available.

With SAS, regular reports are generated as an operational warning and analyzed to deduce the reasons behind the problems. In the past, it took three days to extract and process the data in order to deduce the results. But with SAS, it takes only an hour to create the scenario, check the results, and create a report.

With a vastly improved decision-making process, CJ Internet can analyze and compare the number of users with more than 50 million records for payments, sales and services information. CJ Internet plans to use this information to analyze member feedback, CRM issues, sales figures, current amounts of cybermoney and sales forecasts. These results can then be used for promotional events, pricing considerations, and many aspects of senior management decision making.
 
CJ Internet is now evolving toward an advanced use of business analytics for proactive decision making. The scope of its original BI tool was limited to analyzing reasons and finding solutions – essentially decision making based on past results. However, business analytics can help CJ Internet to find out why those results happened, determine what will happen next, and provide better analysis and forecasting for how to respond.

There are plans to create a Business Intelligence Competency Center (BICC) that will coordinate between work-site operations, IT and BI analysts. A BICC can deduce amazing insights that work-site operations are often not able to predict. By focusing on this organization, CJ Internet will widen its BI expertise by recruiting analysts and planning and operation specialists.

Mr. Hyun said, "We are planning to run a phase-by-phase process with our BI experts that will raise our number of power users to 30 percent. If we possess many BI experts, I expect that our competitiveness will grow significantly."

Power users can use the algorithms deduced by the experts who analyze all the unstructured data, and CJ Internet already has trained 30 power users. The organization is planning to train 30 more this year, and hopes to have 100 more trained for next year. CJ Internet also intends to train one or two more experts in the design and analysis of algorithms.

Mr. Hyun adds, "If work-site operations started to use data on their own, the level of information would increase. This would enable us to raise the level of our IT infrastructure, and we can then use more highly developed data."

As synergy increases across departments and results keep improving, CJ Internet expects it will secure its analysis capabilities and be well on its way to becoming a world-class company.

The results illustrated in this article are specific to the particular situations, business models, data input, and computing environments described herein. Each SAS customer’s experience is unique based on business and technical variables and all statements must be considered non-typical. Actual savings, results, and performance characteristics will vary depending on individual customer configurations and conditions. SAS does not guarantee or represent that every customer will achieve similar results. The only warranties for SAS products and services are those that are set forth in the express warranty statements in the written agreement for such products and services. Nothing herein should be construed as constituting an additional warranty. Customers have shared their successes with SAS as part of an agreed-upon contractual exchange or project success summarization following a successful implementation of SAS software. Brand and product names are trademarks of their respective companies.

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