King.com has over 40 million registered players and offers games online and via mobile devices, where it gets over half of its traffic through Facebook.

The company's director of data warehousing, Mats-Mats Eirksson, told ComputerworldUK that analytics is vital to its success online.

"Analytics is one of the things that made king.com the thing that it is today. In the universe that we operate in, gaming online, it is absolutely essential to know as much as possible about the players and optimise everything," said Eriksson.

"You can get so much information just by looking at the user behaviour, which you can then use to create better games and better monetisation features. At the end of the day we want to make money out of this."

King.com is replaced its Infobright platform with Hadoop at the end of last year. Hadoop uses a process called parallel programming, which allows analytics to be run on hundreds of servers, with lots of disk drives, all at the same time. It stores this data in a file system called HDFS (Hadoop distributed file system), in effect a flat file system that can spread data across multiple disk drives and servers.