Full Tilt Poker Selects Aster Data for Analytics and Fraud Detection

Aster Data, dedicated to providing data analytics and management platform for “Big Data” applications, announced that Pocket Kings, a software development and marketing company whose proprietary software powers the virtual online cardroom for Full Tilt Poker, has selected the Aster nCluster system for their data processing and data warehousing needs. Full Tilt Poker, the online home of some the most respected poker players in the world, will use Aster nCluster to provide better customer service to players, protect players from fraud, manage their increasing data volumes, and lower their data management and processing infrastructure costs. Aster also announced the opening of its European headquarters. The office will be headed by industry veteran and newly appointed Europe Area Director Bob Pearson. “Aster Data provides a robust distributed data warehousing solution with powerful analytics capabilities that cuts down our end-to-end fraud analysis cycle time from 7 days to 15 minutes and queries that took 90 minutes now execute in 90 seconds,” said a spokesperson for Pocket Kings. “Not only did we dramatically improve our fraud process by reducing analysis cycle times, and significantly increase analysis performance, but we have lowered our total cost of ownership; including lower hardware costs, software infrastructure, and maintenance.” Because of the success of Full Tilt Poker, Pocket Kings found their data growth was becoming unmanageable, resulting in fraud-related analysis taking longer to process than customers demanded. Their rapidly increasing data volumes and analytical requirements resulted in increased infrastructure costs and lower overall margins. With their transactional data being stored in a traditional RDBMS that could not perform rich in-database analytics, Pocket Kings needed to export data to a different system for fraud analysis. The fraud process could only be run once a week due to the slow data movement and processing. With Aster nCluster, performance has increased 115x because all processes are performed in-database, eliminating data movement and improving analytic processing throughput. Aster nCluster is processing 140,000 transactions per second versus 1,200 transactions per second with the previous system. Even more, the massively parallelized query processing is done across low cost commodity servers, saving money. (Aster Data: ma)