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June 11, 2014

IBM Presides Over ‘Marriages Made with Data’

Just when it seemed all the possible marketing applications of big data analytics were exhausted, one of India’s “leading matrimony portals,” announced it is using IBM big data technologies “to match potential partners faster.”

“We are the gateway to Happy Marriages,” the Matrimony.com site declares. India’s “signature internet conglomerate” also operates AssistedMatrimony.com, EliteMatrimony.com, CommunityMatrimony.com and MatrimonyGifts.com.

The partners promise matrimonial bliss through “marriages made with data.” The Indian matchmaker claims 8,000 new members a day. As for results, it further claims to broker 1,500 weddings a day!

IBM India claimed in announcing the deal that the country’s tradition of arranged marriages based on family connections and word of mouth is evolving to include mobile technologies and social media. Together, these technologies are generating increasing amounts of unstructured data that can be analyzed with big data tools.

For example, Matrimony.com claims more than 3 million subscribers who generate “several petabytes of data” on its 350 microsites. The platform is based on what company executives call a “C2C” (member-to-member) model.

Under the deal, IBM India will supply its big data and analytics technologies, including its ExperienceOne customer engagement tool and SPSS predictive analytics software. “We needed an automated campaign that provides us with accurate direction,” Jayaram Iyer, chief strategy and analytics officer with Matrimony.com, said in a statement.

Here’s the wedding web site’s challenge, according to IBM: First, it must integrated a fragmented subscriber database with varied sets of partner preferences. Next, it must find a way to consolidate “multi-channel user data” across different media and geographic locations.

Finally, the website must target its marketing campaigns to its more than 3 million subscribers based not only in India but across South Asia, the U.K., even the Middle East.

Matrimony.com’s customer data is flowing in from a variety of channels, including emails, SMS text messages, potential subscribers clicking on online banner ads and from India’s ubiquitous call centers. The partners said they want to leverage big data analytics to improve “personalization” in the website’s marketing campaigns.

Matrimony.com’s Iyer said the IBM analytics tools would be used to meet computational requirements for what he called “propensity analysis” of the website’s channels and products.

IBM acknowledged that Matrimony.com is “an unconventional client for us.” Jason Mosakowski, director of IBM India’s Software Group, said it came up with a way to structure the large amounts of unstructured data collected by the marriage website.

The result, the partners said, is “improve personalization and more accurate matches.”

Whether “marriages made with data” are happy marriages remains to be seen. But the growth of mobile and social media technologies, especially in emerging markets like Indian and China, likely means there will be growing demand in the developing world for tools that can be used to make sense of huge amounts of unstructured data.

Datanami