ITOCHU Corporation (headquartered in Minato-ku, Tokyo; Keita Ishii, President & COO; hereinafter “ITOCHU”) announced today that it has agreed upon a three-way business alliance with GI Cloud, Inc. (headquartered in Minato-ku, Tokyo; Tasuku Yamazaki, President & CEO; hereinafter “GI Cloud”) and WingArc1st Inc. (headquartered in Minato-ku, Tokyo; Jun Tanaka, President and CEO; hereinafter “WingArc1st”) for supporting and driving the digital transformation (hereinafter "DX") of enterprises based on the Google Cloud^*1 infrastructure. As the first step in efforts under this alliance, the partners will launch a service for building, analyzing and visualizing effective big data processing platforms on the cloud.

In recent years, with growing demand to implement DX, the volume of data being handled by businesses has continued to increase, and companies must move swiftly in order to stay ahead of various challenges based on insights gained through data utilization. At the same time, making effective use of data requires efficient integration with existing systems, along with the training and development of highly specialized engineers and IT infrastructure. In particular, in data analysis focused on LOB (line of business), which involves the business processes of primarily sales and marketing divisions, it is said that the need for the kind of responses described above is a prominent issue at the time of introduction.

On this occasion, ITOCHU, GI Cloud and WingArc1st have agreed to engage in a business alliance to support and drive DX at businesses based on the Google Cloud infrastructure. As the first step in this alliance, the partners will commence provision of a data analysis service that integrates Google Cloud's big data analysis enterprise-oriented data warehouse BigQuery™^*2—which is specialized toward big data analysis—with WingArc1st's BI dashboard MotionBoard^*3.
Specifically, connecting MotionBoard (a BI dashboard that consolidates and visualizes multiple data sources) with Big Query (which enables almost real-time analysis of data using a fully managed analysis data warehouse) facilitates the acquisition and visualization of necessary data simply by issuing a query^*4 and without the need for large-scale data preparation, in which the collected target data is processed, combined and cleansed according to the output format.

WingArc1st will roll out this service utilizing its customer network, which boasts the the top market share^*5 in Japan in the field of data analysis. ITOCHU will leverage its domestic and overseas networks to support the deployment of this service, while GI Cloud—as a dedicated Google Cloud integrator—will provide system building support for BigQuery environments and integration with companies' existing systems.

The service utilizes BigQuery—which can perform high-speed processing of big data—to enable enterprises with large amounts of data to perform real-time analysis.
- Omnichannel data analysis for multiple EC sites and physical store locations
- Analysis of customer behaviors and purchasing processes obtained from website and purchase histories
- Realtime analysis of POS and inventory data by chain stores
- Building company-wide data analysis platforms