InMobi
InMobi is the world's largest independent mobile advertising network. With offices on five continents InMobi provides advertisers, publishers and developers with a uniquely global solution for advertising. The network is growing and now delivers the unprecedented ability to reach 485 Million consumers, in over 165 countries, through more than 77.6 Billion mobile ad impressions monthly. The recent acquisition of Sprout, a leading HTML5 authoring platform for mobile rich media, helps expand InMobi's offering to creative agencies and brands. To learn more, please visit www.inmobi.com/research, follow InMobi on Twitter @InMobi, or read their blog at www.inmobi.com/inmobiblog/.
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InMobi has deployed the Infobright® Enterprise Edition (IEE) analytic database to deliver fast, ad-hoc analysis of mobile advertising data. IEE's ultra-fast query performance and deep compression capabilities will help InMobi deliver rich insights that mobile advertisers can use to optimize their campaigns and return on investment.
Challenge
InMobi's Analytics service captures large volumes of data including over 76 billion mobile ad impressions monthly, consumer engagement data such as clickthroughs, user actions and a wealth of targeting information about handsets, network carriers, time of day, demographics, behaviors and more. Combining this data with user history and profiles enables InMobi to serve the most effective ads to each customer at the right time and to assess mobile ad performance against campaign objectives. InMobi's existing database solution could no longer handle the huge volumes of data that they needed to analyze nor was it flexible enough to support the highly variable nature of their analytic demands.
Our existing database solution could no longer handle the huge volumes of data that we needed to analyze for our customers, nor was it flexible enough to support the highly variable nature of their analytic demands.
- Mohit Saxena, Vice President of Technology
Solution
InMobi uses Infobright in conjunction with Hadoop. About 60-70 TBs of raw data logs stream into the Hadoop cluster during each month, while 3-4 TBs of summary information are loaded into IEE for real-time analysis. IEE's innovative Knowledge Grid architecture enables InMobi to extract insight from this data much faster than before—queries that used to take 30 minutes to hours in Hadoop are now completed in less than 10 seconds. This is a critical requirement because InMobi's customers need to be able to use the intelligence about ad performance and mobile user activity to make on-the-fly adjustments to their campaigns. Hardware costs were also a concern for InMobi, and Infobright's deep compression capabilities will enable the company to avoid the significant expense associated with adding more storage.
We selected the Infobright solution based on its ability to perform fast, ad-hoc analytics on very big data sets without manual tuning or a lot of maintenance. IEE's capabilities will give us the power and speed we need to affordably support the analytic needs of our growing customer base.
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Sonus Networks
Sonus Networks, Inc. (Nasdaq: SONS) is a leader in IP networking with proven expertise in delivering secure, reliable and scalable next generation infrastructure and subscriber solutions. With customers in over 50 countries across the globe and over a decade of experience in transforming networks to IP, Sonus has enabled service providers and enterprises to capture and retain users and generate significant ROI. For more information, visit www.sonusnet.com and the Sonus in Session blog .
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Sonus’ Network Analytics solutions, which includes NetScore™, NetEng™ and NetAssure™, help keep networks running at optimal efficiency by automatically capturing, scoring and transforming data from Sonus network elements into actionable information. Sonus Networks chose Infobright® Enterprise Edition as the new embedded analytic database to store and analyze large volumes of call data.
Challenge
Shifts in network traffic, transient overloads, outdated configurations and inefficient call routes can all negatively impact network performance. Network operators need fast access to call data with the ability to instaneously drill down into the data to manage network performance. Sonus Networks determined they needed an embedded database with fast query response and with the ability to do ad-hoc data analysis, while keeping more data history using less storage.
Our customers rely on our analytic solutions to provide them with real-time actionable insight on their network performance and understanding of their customer’s Quality of Experience.
- Wassim Matragi, vice president of Sonus’ Network Design and Analysis Group
Solution
Adding Infobright to the Network Analytics solutions will give Sonus customers the ability to do fast ad-hoc analysis and immediate drill-down into specific control points to quickly identify the cause of service-affecting problems. In addition, Infobright’s deep-data compression will enable Sonus customers to keep longer data history for trending analysis, which uses significantly less disk storage.
Using Infobright with our Network Analytics solutions provides our customers with outstanding database query performance, especially for ad-hoc analytics and instantaneous drill-down into large volumes of CDR data. This delivers a preemptive, results-oriented approach to managing the overall network performance.
- Wassim Matragi, vice president of Sonus’ Network Design and Analysis Group
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AdSafe Media
AdSafe Media is the rating standard of online media. AdSafe uses proprietary algorithmic modeling and human verification to rate the brand safety of content on commercially supported web pages via the AdSafe Content Rating System. AdSafe's BrandSafe Firewall enables brands, agencies and ad-networks to prevent advertising from appearing on publisher web pages that do not conform to brand guidelines. AdSafe's Network Monitor platform enables ad-networks and publishers to identify and segment problematic site content, increasing monetization of display inventory. AdSafe is headquartered in New York, NY with operations in California and London, England. For more information visit http://www.AdSafeMedia.com or follow @AdSafe on Twitter.
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AdSafe’s rating system provides an independent, third-party content-rating and certification platform to help standardize and better control the online advertising ecosystem. With AdSafe's proprietary Firewall product, marketers' advertising only appears on sites with content deemed by the marketer to be consistent with brand image and corporate philosophy. AdSafe enables ad-networks to monitor their inventory performance and provides a third-party certification of publisher site content.
Challenge
With double-digit growth in the number of campaigns managed each month and hundreds of millions of rows of data streaming in every day, AdSafe was looking for a faster, more scalable database alternative to its existing database. This database is available to AdSafe’s customers for reporting and analyzing of the data collected about their advertising campaigns.
Infobright provided the query performance, scalability and cost-effectiveness we needed to accommodate our tremendous business growth.
- David Hahn, SVP Product Management, AdSafe Media
Solution
After reviewing various options, AdSafe selected IEE as its analytic platform that enables clients – including publishers, advertisers, networks and agencies – to perform fast ad-hoc analysis of online advertising campaigns. AdSafe also implemented a Hadoop cluster that stores all of the detailed data, from which data is extracted and loaded into Infobright. The combination of Infobright and Hadoop lets organizations leverage Hadoop’s large-scale distributed batch processing benefits with Infobright’s fast ad hoc analytic capabilities.
AdSafe Media is among the new breed of online companies experiencing rapid business growth, huge increases in data volume and a need for real-time intelligence. They understood the need to choose technologies that can support their current and future needs without adding cost and complexity.
- Don DeLoach, President and CEO of Infobright
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Bell Helicopter
Bell Helicopter is the world’s leading provider of vertical lift aircraft and the inventor of the first tilt rotor aircraft, a remarkable aircraft that lifts like a helicopter, then flies like an airplane with twice the speed, three times the payload and five times the range of traditional helicopters. In recent years, business intelligence has emerged as a key factor in the company’s drive for operational excellence and competitiveness.
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Bell Helicopter chose Zend® Server and the Infobright® Enterprise Edition (IEE) analytic database to improve its large-scale enterprise reporting application for better business intelligence. Known as Premier, the Bell Helicopter application dynamically captures and reports on real-time and historical data from more than 40 different data sources originating from financial, HR, manufacturing, ERP and other systems across the organization.
Challenge
To compete for defense contracts over $20M, Bell Helicopter must meet 32 government-mandated guidelines for compliance with earned value management (EVM) reporting. In-depth project forecasting and reporting during the design and manufacture of complex aircraft necessarily involves large volumes of data drawn from systems across the organization. As business grows and data proliferates, so, too, do end user reporting requirements. This places heavy demands upon enterprise reporting systems to deliver faster business intelligence, and an increased burden for IT and system/database administrators. When EVM reporting problems arose at Bell Helicopter, leading to instances of late and over-cost aircraft, the company temporarily lost its certification and faced more than $40M in government contract withholds. Query performance was lagging, and the EVM Systems Group had little visibility into the production environment. Consequently, end user support was labor-intensive, involving manual screen captures and long trial and error troubleshooting sessions to resolve issues over the phone. Meanwhile, VIPs and other business and engineering users were waiting for their data. With the company’s explosive data growth, storage was also becoming an issue. The company needed to revamp its reporting system for improved automation and performance while keeping costs under control.
The Premier application is strategic to Bell Helicopter’s business. Zend and Infobright are helping us ensure that users get fast access to the business intelligence they need—while automating and streamlining application development and data administration. With the combined solution we are delivering essential performance and storage upgrades while remaining well within budget.
- Scott Hathaway, Manager of EVM Reporting and Analysis, Bell Helicopter
Solution
The EVM Systems Group laid plans to overhaul its enterprise reporting system targeting significant improvements in application responsiveness, high availability, scalability and resource utilization. Software from Zend Technologies and Infobright were brought into the EVM Systems Group’s WAMP-based development and production environments, providing much-needed tools for application development and management and database analytics. The group’s developers ran the Zend PHP stack and Infobright® Enterprise Edition analytic database on their Windows laptops with local copies of MySQL. The Premier application has more than 1500 pages and it draws from a decade’s worth of data from 40 different data sources. Uncompressed, there’s an estimated 60G of data. On any given day, close to 3,000 Bell Helicopter VIPs, engineers, administrative staff and government clients access Premier’s web-based dashboard for on-demand access to real-time and historical HR, financials, earned value data, cost and schedule information, MRP, quality and other data.
By deploying Infobright Enterprise Edition, we achieved a dramatic 10:1 data compression rate, and we were able to speed analytic queries on executive dashboards by up to 500 percent, with no indexing, partitioning or database tuning required.
- Scott Hathaway, Manager of EVM Reporting and Analysis, Bell Helicopter
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8x8, Inc.
8x8, Inc. leverages its patented software technologies to deliver high quality voice solutions with integrated messaging and video to businesses of any size with employees in any location on a wide variety of business telephony, web and mobile platforms. 8x8 also offers managed hosting and cloud-based computing services.
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Using IEE in conjunction with ETL and reporting tools from open source BI provider Pentaho, 8x8 has been able to combine multiple sources of critical business data into a single engine for integrated analysis.
Challenge
8x8 provides VoIP phone, managed hosting, web conferencing and unified communications services to more than 23,000 small and mid-sized enterprise customers. To keep its business running smoothly, 8x8 needs to be able to quickly and efficiently analyze large volumes of incoming sales, customer and order-related data. But with information originating in multiple source systems, delivering the combined business intelligence reports that end users were demanding had become an administrative burden. 8x8 turned to Infobright and Pentaho for an integrated BI solution that enables the company to capture, load, analyze and report on its data from a central environment.
We were looking for a good product that would last but would not need to be an expensive solution.
- Ram Narayanaswamy, Chief Technology Officer, 8x8
Solution
IEE’s capabilities have enabled 8x8 to achieve over 10:1 data compression, improve query performance, streamline reporting and simplify administration. IEE will also allow 8x8 to move from a daily data load to a near real-time loading environment. Prior to deployment, 8x8 reviewed other database solutions from providers such as IBM and Oracle, and determined that IEE offered the best analytic performance at the most affordable price.
Infobright has eliminated the headaches that previously surrounded our myriad reporting requirements. We used to have a team of experts ready to respond to user requests for multiple queries and reports. Now, users don’t have to come to us at all—Infobright enables us to automate numerous pre-configured reports and to provide users the ability to create ad-hoc queries and reports themselves. This is a huge efficiency gain.”
- Ram Narayanaswamy, Chief Technology Officer, 8x8
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USDA
The National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA), an agency within the U.S. Department of Agriculture, advances knowledge for agriculture, the environment, human health and well-being, and communities—all by supporting research, education, and extension programs in the U.S. Federal Land-Grant University System and other partner organizations. To this end, NIFA helps identify and fund important research, education, and extension programs at the state and local level, and provides program leadership in these areas.
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The National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) is using open source technologies from Jaspersoft (BI), Infobright (database) and Talend (data integration) to dramatically improve information sharing—including unstructured textual data—among key research institutions, internal research teams and the offices of the U.S. Congress.
Challenge
To facilitate its dual roles of oversight and leadership in government-sponsored research related to agriculture, health and environment, NIFA must efficiently and accurately extracting “impact and outcome” meaning from a huge—and growing—number of unstructured, primarily textual documents, then making it available both for analysis and public access. Their current Oracle solution with Crystal Reports required specialized staff - and huge upgrade costs to achieve the kind of structure, reporting and query support required.
To achieve the kind of structure, reporting and query support we required, we would need to upgrade to a new Oracle solution—priced at over $200,000. So we started looking for new solutions—especially those in the open source arena.
- Joe Barbano, NIFA
Solution
After a careful search trying to find technologies that would cut cost and more effectively meet its unique information management needs, NIFA has had great success in building the business intelligence platform using Jaspersoft for reporting and dashboards, Infobright for the analytic database and Talend for data integration.
With Ruby on Rails, we can deliver some very nice ad hoc queries that access the data through the Infobright technology. This gives us fast, highly efficient performance thanks to Infobright’s columnar architecture.
- Joe Barbano, NIFA
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LiveRail
LiveRail delivers technology solutions that enable and enhance the monetization of internet-distributed video. By focusing specifically on challenges and opportunities created by online video, LiveRail's tools are designed to be easier, more efficient and more effective than traditional display ad servers to deliver and track advertising into this exciting new medium. Their platform enables publishers, advertisers, ad networks and media groups to manage, target, display and track advertising in online video.
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Unlike simple online display advertising that primarily tracks impressions served and user clicks, LiveRail monitors more than a dozen engagement metrics including percentage viewed/completed, pause/resume and muting—giving advertisers greater insight into the performance of their campaigns. Ad networks and agencies can track performance and delivery of video ad campaigns across all their publishers and view network-wide activity.
Challenge
With a growing roster of customers, LiveRail was faced with managing increasingly large data volumes and a need to provide clients with near real-time access to this information for reporting and ad-hoc analysis.
Infobright and Hadoop are complementary technologies that help us manage large amounts of data while meeting diverse customers needs to analyze the performance of their video advertising investments.
- Andrei Dunca, CTO of LiveRail
Solution
LiveRail chose two complementary technologies to manage the hundreds of millions of rows of data that are generated every day: Apache Hadoop Hive and Infobright. All of the detailed data is run through an extract-transform-load (ETL) process, then loaded hourly into a server cluster running Apache Hadoop Hive. Summary data is created hourly as well, and loaded into IEE to enable LiveRail customers to conduct ad-hoc analysis and use the solution’s robust reporting capabilities within LiveRail’s platform. Customers can also schedule time to access the cookie-level data stored in Hadoop Hive if needed.
Infobright gives our customers the ability to do fast, ad-hoc analysis against the extensive video advertising data.
- Andrei Dunca, CTO of LiveRail
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Bluefin Group
Bluefin offers individuals and companies comprehensive advice on insurance, financial advice and planning. Backed by the AXA Group, one of the world’s largest financial organizations, Bluefin employs around 2,500 people in over 80 offices throughout the UK. For further details, please visit http://www.bluefingroup.co.uk.
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Bluefin selected Infobright® Enterprise Edition (IEE) database to meet its need for detailed analysis and data warehousing capabilities. Bluefin, formed from the merger of 14 separate companies, initiated the data warehouse project to pull together all the data from the systems that were acquired after Bluefin was formed. This allows them to perform analysis of data sourced from the logs on their production clusters to get one consolidated, master view, providing reporting and analysis of the logs in an easier, more consistent way.
Challenge
Bluefin needed a single view of all the data from the different organizations and systems they acquired when Bluefin was formed. Their existing proprietary transactional RDBMS was too expensive and unwieldy for their requirements, and they needed a solution that could grow with the project. Bluefin researched open source solutions where they were not tied in, or locked into expensive contracts. Their starting point was Postgres and MySQL. Of the two, they decided that MySQL offered more options for the future in terms of data warehousing solutions with its different database engines. After prototyping an initial system it became obvious that space and performance were going to become an issue, or at least require a lot of resource and time to solve. After evaluating several alternatives Infobright became their favored option.
Our existing propriety transactional RDBMS is too expensive and unwieldy for our requirements. We needed a solution that could grow with the project.
- Angus Tosh, Bluefin’s Orbit Technology Data & Infrastructure Architect
Solution
Infobright was selected after the evaluation as it required very little setup or configuration; the columnar database design coupled with the Knowledge Grid architecture delivered huge gains in performance with no effort on their part; and the data compression meant that they can delay expensive storage solutions for the near to mid future .Infobright’s ability to handle large data volumes will provide Bluefin’s management team with a single view of the company, allowing strategic and tactical analysis of the overall business.
The Infobright database has delivered huge gains in performance and the high rate of data compression has also meant that we can delay expensive storage solutions for the near- to mid-future.
- Angus Tosh, Bluefin’s Orbit Technology Data & Infrastructure Architect
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IMImobile
IMImobile is a pioneer in the mobile data space offering a rich portfolio of managed services for mobile operators, media companies and enterprises. IMImobile recently completed the 100 per cent acquisition of UK mobile content and services company WINplc; has over 600 employees and a global presence across Asia, Europe, Latin America, Middle East and Africa. The company hosts its technology platforms and services in data centers worldwide and currently enables over more than 100 operator and blue-chip enterprise customers in some 70 countries around the world generating 40 million billing transactions every month and reaching over 780 million subscribers worldwide.
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IMImobile has selected Infobright® Enterprise Edition (IEE) to use within its DaVinci Evolved Services platform. Da Vinci is part of the company’s suite of managed mobile services offerings to its customers and IMImobile will use IEE to quickly process the large amount of network and usage data that is generated from its various platforms to provide innovative and personalized services to the end users.
Challenge
IMImobile's industry leading DaVinci Evolved Service Platform™ powers a wide range of services created, delivered and managed by IMImobile including: social aggregation, contact management, mobile advertising, mobile marketing, messaging, storefronts, ring back tones and digital music services. These services are enabled through robust technology platforms including carrier grade messaging platforms and gateways, voice platforms, content management and 3rd party application aggregation systems. As its business has grown, so has the volume of data generated generated from IMImobile's various platforms and services, along with data from Operator networks. IMImobile was looking for a cost-effective database as the basis for a “Subscriber Data Hub” which will enable their customers to generate deep insights into user behavior on a mobile network across multiple channels.
We want to help our customers take greater advantage of all the mobile data at their disposal—both for historical as well as predictive analysis—but needed a way to speed up the processing of the overwhelming volume and diversity of information available so that the results can be used in near real time conditions.
- Vishwanath Alluri, Chairman, CEO and Founder of IMImobile
Solution
IMImobile selected Infobright® Enterprise Edition (IEE) to use within its DaVinci Evolved Services platform. IEE will help form the foundation for subscriber retention, loyalty programs, personalized campaigns and promotions, advertisements, real-time offerings, rewards and fulfillment etc., that will help customers increase their revenues through increased subscriber focus.
IEE’s compression capabilities, as well as the consistency of its performance against increasing data volumes, were key factors in our selection of Infobright
- Vishwanath Alluri, Chairman, CEO and Founder of IMImobile
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J. Craig Venter Institute
The J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI), formed in October 2006 through the merger of several affiliated and legacy scientific research organizations, is a world leader in genomic research. Its president and founder Dr. Venter is best known for the pioneering research he and his team did in decoding the first draft of the human genome. Since its founding, JCVI has been engaged in some of the most fruitful and exciting research in the biological sciences.
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One of the key initiatives is to unlock the secrets of the oceans by sampling, sequencing and analyzing the DNA of the microorganisms living in there. The Sorcerer II Global Ocean Sampling Expedition has already uncovered more than 40 million new genes and thousands of new protein families from organisms found in sea water. The team uses a metagenomic approach in which genomic analysis (the analysisof all DNA in an organism) is conducted on the entire community of microbes within the sample rather than isolating and culturing each individual microbial species. These samples are then analyzed against a database that contains previously decoded microbial genomes. Through this process, many new organisms are being identified, and their genomic information has become part of the ever-expanding database of known organisms. JCVI researchers are using this information to better understand the evolution of these organisms, and how they are related to each other. This information can also lead to advances in human health, climate and environmental remediation, agricultural improvements, and in other important areas.
Challenge
Not surprisingly, genomic sequencing and analysis requires capturing, storing and analyzing large data sets. To make the data accessible to researchers both within JCVI and the scientific community at large, JCVI developed APIS, the Automated Phylogenomic Inference System. APIS is updated as the genomes of new organisms are completed. APIS includes a number of database instances. Two public databases, previously stored in MySQL, were moved to Infobright to accommodate the growing number of users who wanted access to the data.
While it is still early in our use of Infobright, it has proven to be very efficient and easy to deploy.
- Michael Heaney, JCVI IT
Solution
Infobright, designed for fast queries against large data volumes, was an ideal choice for JCVI as it provided: - 17:1 data compression: One database was 433GB in MySQL, and only 25GB of space in Infobright. The second database was compressed from 112GB of data in MySQL to 7GB in Infobright. - Query speed improvements of 10x - Low administrative burden on IT: No indexes, no need to change schemas as the data moved from MySQL to Infobright, easy to manage. - Low cost: Today, Infobright is supporting an increasing number of researchers using a standard server, and running in a virtual machine with 2 CPUs and 8 GB RAM. Its high rate of compression means a significant decrease in the amount of storage needed to support the growing data volume.
We don’t need to do a lot of manipulation of the system to get the performance we need, and the compression and performance are big advantages.
- Michael Heaney, JCVI IT
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Dorel Juvenile Group
Dorel Juvenile Group is a division of Dorel Industries, a global juvenile products and bicycle company. The company’s portfolio of brands includes Cosco®, Safety 1st®, Quinny®, Eddie Bauer® and Maxi-Cosi® and encompasses a vast breadth of products, including car seats, strollers, high chairs, play yards, monitors and more. As the largest manufacturer of children’s car seats in the world and first to introduce a side impact car seat, Dorel attributes its success to an unwavering commitment to safety and value. Established in 1962, Dorel Industries is a US$2 billion company with 4,500 employees, facilities in nineteen countries, and sales worldwide.
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The market-leading product innovation that Dorel’s customers have come to expect demands up-to-the minute intelligence related to sales, financials and manufacturing quality. Sales executives need to see data about who is buying what, in what quantities and when, for instance, or the financial controller might want to examine price variances related to supplier purchases. Getting information into the right hands quickly is critical, and although the company had a BI software solution in place, query response times were becoming a problem. Dorel’s challenges prompted the company to search for an affordable and easy-to-maintain database solution that could deliver fast query performance to meet current BI requirements, and also accommodate the integration and analysis of additional data sources requested by business end-users throughout the organization.
Challenge
As data volumes grew, performance of Dorel's SQl Server-based database slowed to unacceptable levels of performance. One query involving millions of rows of data from Dorel's general financial ledger was taking 24 hours to run. Business users got so frustrated waiting for reports that many of them went back to crunching numbers on Excel. Dorel’s BI team—which consisted of Manager of BI and Data Warehousing Jon Finerfrock and one other employee—found that they were spending at least 50 percent of their time manually loading, integrating and preparing data for analysis. “Neither one of us is a data base administrator, yet we found ourselves constantly indexing and partitioning data tables just to get various ad-hoc queries to run,” said Finerfrock. “As data volumes got larger and larger, managing it all became incredibly complicated.”
Our SQL Server database just couldn’t keep up with the volume. Basic queries were slow, and ad-hoc requests requiring the integration of several sources of data resulted in administrative nightmares.
- Jon Finerfrock, Manager of Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing
Solution
Instead of hiring a full-time data base administrator or securing expensive new hardware and consulting resources, Dorel chose to implement Infobright Enterprise Edition (IEE). Dorel’s first project using IEE was the re-launch of a sales order BI application that had previously been the source of complaints from end-users due to sluggish performance. Another initiative involved making 100 million+ rows of general financial ledger data available for ongoing, ad-hoc analysis. By leveraging IEE in conjunction with Talend Studio, open source ETL software, Dorel was able to load the sales and financial data required in just hours. Working prototypes were tested in less than three days, and the new data mart was deployed in less than two weeks.
Frankly, our selection of IEE was driven by three things: query speed and management simplicity at a price we could afford. This means that the time previously devoted to data administration can now be directed to higher-value activities.
- Jon Finerfrock, Manager of Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing
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Bunchball
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Challenge
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Solution
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GeoPost UK
GeoPost UK is a leading express parcel carrier and part of LaPoste, Europe’s second largest postal group. Operating as the DPD and Interlink Express brands in the UK, the business has more than 130 depots, 4000 employees and delivers millions of parcels a year. The company has thousands of customers, ranging from multi-nationals to individuals, high street and online retailers.
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GeoPost UK’s senior management team, depot and account managers ran and planned the business (day-to-day and long term) using Excel generated reports. Spreadsheets were manually produced, manipulated and reformatted to produce the required information. As the business has grown, the reports have deviated considerably – departments wanted different reports, formats changed and data was processed multiple times to give specific information.
Challenge
GeoPost UK decided to completely revise its information management. Realising that the business needed to analyse data right down to the individual parcel level, GeoPost personnel wanted to provide a management dashboard which could display the business’ key metrics. GeoPost invited several BI vendors to present their ideas to the company’s Board using GeoPost UK’s own data for the project. But the results from the BI vendors failed to impress, as Vernon Adams, Head of Technology, explained “We were looking at costs of around £1.5million, but the Board just didn’t see the value, particularly as the cost excluded ongoing license and support costs”.
Using proprietary software, the project was estimated at £1.5 million: we couldn’t see the value, when the Open Source alternative would give cost savings of more than 75% for the project.
- Vernon Adams, Head of Technology Architecture & Strategy, GeoPost UK
Solution
Using open source solutions from Jaspersoft, Talend and Infobright, GeoPost implemented the system at a cost of 75% less than alternative approaches. Infobright, with its columnar structure, dramatically improved analytical query times and also simplified data warehouse operations by reducing or eliminating the need for aggregate tables. GeoPost UK has now deployed the new reporting dashboard to more than 600 users across the organisation.
There’s now a standardised interface through the business, through which we can analyse our operations far more effectively. The Board, depot and account managers and the sales teams can drill right down to the individual parcel or delivery route level - in a way that simply wasn’t possible previously. As a result, we’re better placed to make changes and alter the way we operate to increase profitability and further improve our customer service.”
- Vernon Adams, Head of Technology Architecture & Strategy, GeoPost UK
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JCDecaux UK
JCDecaux is Europe’s largest out-of-home advertising company; more than 300,000 people in 3,500 of the world’s largest cities see its advertising structures every day. With an exclusive focus on out-of-home advertising, JCDecaux is the market leader in street furniture, billboards, transport and digital advertising. Founded in France in 1964 by Jean-Claude Decaux, the company has revenues of almost €2.6 billion and offices in Europe, North and South America, the Far East and China. Established in 1983, JCDecaux UK has more than 650 employees and now accounts for more than 25% of the UK’s out-of-home market.
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As part of its IT roadmap to support the expanding and increasingly complex UK operation, JCDecaux UK decided to develop a company-wide Business Intelligence (BI) solution. Its aim was to ensure that the UK management team had the information they needed to make better informed decisions – at a strategic and operational level. Essential to its success was producing detailed, accurate weekly reports on the UK’s activities: as well as being able to provide detailed, up-to-date information to JCDecaux’s head office in France. The short proof of concept, conducted by Infobright partner Open Business Associates (OBA), demonstrated that Infobright's column-oriented database, powerful data compression and optimized load capabilities were particularly suitable for JCDecaux’s high data volume needs. JCDecaux selected Infobright as the analytic database for this critical project.
Challenge
JCDecaux UK stored its assets and sales data on three separate databases – one for each large format advertising, street furniture and airports - its three key business areas. “All the management and operational information had to be extracted using Business Objects or produced in Excel and Access” according to Raj Rajkumar, JCDecaux’s Financial Systems & BI Manager. “As we had no common information bank to draw on, we had to spend hours gathering information from scattered data sources. Reports were often produced in different formats using different data sources, processes and methods. Over time, we’d seen our users developing their own complex reporting options to provide the data they needed. Reporting had become very inefficient, it took too long and didn’t meet our business needs.”
Given the complexity of our business and the sheer volume of data, it was obvious that our existing solutions just weren’t a viable option. We had millions and millions of lines of data, so making any changes was difficult, time-consuming and took too long. It simply couldn’t handle the volume of data and produce reports inside an acceptable time frame.
- Stephan Lavollee, IT Manager at JCDecaux UK
Solution
Based on the results of the pilot, OBA began implementing Infobright in December 2009. During the three month project, OBA recommended that JCDecaux use Talend as its ETL tool; partly due to its ability to handle complex data transformation logic and also because the product already had a data connector for Infobright. “I’m delighted with the outcome," said Stephan, "data loads that used to take two hours are now happening in 20 minutes. We can now produce the essential reports in less than three minutes, when originally we couldn’t produce them at all. Our users are very happy, because they have the information they need within the timescales and can meet their deadlines.”
I was amazed with the results. Queries which had taken more than 15 minutes using MySQL only took a couple of seconds using Infobright. It handled all our data, we could generate reports easily and it was very obvious, even from this short trial, that it was the solution we needed.
- Raj Rajkumar, Financial Systems & BI Manager
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Primatics Financial
Primatics Financial provides accounting compliance, analytics, valuation, and risk management to small, medium and large size financial institutions. A leading-edge consulting and product development firm, Primatics is widely recognized for its ability to combine innovation with extensive domain expertise – bridging the gap between data, analytics, accounting, and technology to deliver progressive, promising end-to-end solutions. Primatics needed an analytic database that could improve the speed and performance of its financial and risk management analytic applications.
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Primatics Financial is a rapidly growing business consulting and technology solutions firm that offers services and software products to financial institutions and government agencies serving the financial services sector. They are based in McLean, Virginia and employ over 150 professionals in support of our two primary lines of business, Primatics Consulting and Primatics Systems. Primatics Systems offers software product solutions, primarily addressing client needs in the areas of loan and security portfolio management.
Challenge
Primatics needed an analytic database that could improve query performance against financial account and transactional data that is updated via a monthly batch cycle. They also wanted to decrease the application operating costs by shrinking disk footprint by use of a database with a high degree of data compression. The solution needed to work well with the BI suite from Microstrategy.
We needed a database that could meet our strict BI performance requirements while being flexible enough to be able to drill down to the most granular level. We used the cloud to parallelize our computation engine and that necessitated a database that can keep up with the volumes of data we were creating.
- Francis de la Cruz, technical lead at Primatics Financial
Solution
Primatics selected Infobright Enterprise Edition (IEE) due to its extreme data compression, which met their needs of reducing the hardware footprint, combined with its fast query performance. In addition, IEE's ease of administration and affordable pricing were key to its selection by Primatics.
IEE’s extreme data compression capabilities combined with its high performing analytic engine, administrative simplicity and affordable pricing matches well with our requirements.
- Francis de la Cruz, technical lead at Primatics Financial
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Online Retail
This global retailer, one of the world’s largest, operates thousands of stores and also has a fast growing online business. Increasing market share and revenue in the retail market requires a better understanding of customers than the competition, and this is true with online retail as well.
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In order to continue to increase revenue, a system that would analyze online customer behavior and enable sophisticated predictive analytics was implemented. Questions such as “if we speed up page loading by one second, what is the predicted impact on sales versus the systems cost of doing so?” would be answered through this implementation.
Challenge
The first phase of the project was to extract and analyze detailed web data from the company’s Omniture service. The goal was to provide the detailed data to the desktop of the business analysts. Phase 2 will enhance that data with other information from sales and customer applications. The primary challenges this retailer faced was a result of the large volume of data generated each day and captured by the Omniture web analytics service. Each day about 40 million rows of data are generated, and the goal was to have one year of history in the database on a rolling basis. This data volume presented a challenge in terms of: • Time to load data • Query response time Initially the IT group tried to load the data into the central database (a traditional row-oriented database). The resulting query performance was very slow, as is often the case when trying to do analytics against large data volumes using a database designed for online transaction processing rather than analytic applications.
In order to bypass the corporate database and load data directly to their desktops, the business analysts became both the users of the system and the implementation team. While they were very familiar with using database technology, the database needed to be self-tuning and self-managing to avoid the need for database adminstration expertise.
- Infobright Sales Engineer
Solution
Working with Infobright, the system was set up and ready to go in about two weeks. This included automating the extraction of the relevant data from Omniture and loading it into Infobright on a daily basis, and fully testing the end-to-end process. The company achieved the goals they had set: • excellent query performance • automated and daily loading of data • managing the data in an efficient way • doing analytics more easily and without DBA assistance.
Infobright is an excellent tool to manage large amounts of static data. It is great to have control of our own data, and this has become an important tool for the analyst team
- Retailer’s business analyst
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Bango
Headquartered in the United Kingdom, Bango provides the technology that powers commerce for businesses targeting the growing market of internet-enabled mobile phone users. Bango’s products collect payment from mobile users for on-line content and services, and provide accurate analytics back to mobile carriers and content providers about marketing campaigns and user behavior. The world’s leading brands, as well as thousands of content providers and developers, use Bango products to more effectively run their mobile businesses.
Overview download as pdf
Bango selected Infobright’s high performance analytic database to meet the challenge of managing the explosive data growth from mobile advertising and to support its rapidly growing business. Using Infobright Enterprise Edition (IEE), Bango can support the real-time analytic needs of their largest customers, enabling them to achieve much faster query performance against larger volumes of data than it could using their existing SQL Server database.
Challenge
More than 50 million unique mobile subscribers from all over the world are identified by the Bango system, and as the company’s business has grown, so has the massive volume of data that needs to be stored, loaded and made available to its customers for analysis. With tens of millions of records coming in every day, query performance was a growing concern because Bango’s SQL Server-based database could not provide the performance needed at higher data volumes. When Bango signed one of its largest customers to date—a well-known global media provider with analysis requirements that encompass more than 150 million rows and 450 Gigabytes of mobile data each month—the company knew that it needed a solution that could help it quickly and cost effectively scale its business while delivering the performance that customers with large data volumes demand.
We recently signed one of our largest customers to date—a media company that needs to analyze more than 150 million events and 450 Gigabytes of mobile data each month. With Infobright, this customer has access to data within minutes of transactions occurring, and can run ad hoc queries with amazing performance. Our new database platform enables us to offer services to much larger customers which helps us grow our business even faster.
- Ray Anderson, CEO of Bango.
Solution
Infobright’s analytic database delivers fast query performance against large volumes of data with minimal IT effort, and at the lowest cost. Bango was able to deploy IEE in just a few weeks, with minimal development and administrative effort. Bango also gained tremendous performance and data compression benefits: Query Performance: An ad-hoc report that included 5 million events ran in 11 minutes in SQL Server, but only 10 seconds with Infobright. Even more remarkable, a report with 15 million events that ran in 43 minutes in SQL Server took only 23 seconds with Infobright. Data Compression: Data that required 450GB of storage using SQL Server required only 10GB with Infobright, due to Infobright’s massive compression and the elimination of all indexes.
Our technology and the choice of partners that underlies our capabilities is vital to our continued leadership in the marketplace. Our experience with Infobright has proven to us that it is the right database for rapid analysis of the large volumes of web and mobile transactions we collect, delivering outstanding query performance for our customers without indexes, manual tuning or other administrative effort.
- Tim Moss, Chief Data Officer of Bango
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Austin Energy
A municipal utility owned and operated by the City of Austin, Austin Energy has provided the city with electric service for over 100 years. Austin Energy is the ninth largest public power utility in the nation. Austin Energy provides power generation, distribution, transmission and substation transmission.
Overview download as pdf
Austin Energy needed a low-cost, end-to-end solution that would enable it to give users at various levels throughout the organization timely access to relevant performance metrics, as well as the ability to perform ad hoc data analysis. This goal was met using Infobright and Jaspersoft technologies instead of the traditional, expensive, resource-intensive products used by many companies today. Two project managers, working part-time over six weeks, were able to meet all of the requirements of the project and subsequently began a staged institutionalization of the performance management solution throughout Austin Energy.
Challenge
Traditional business intelligence and data warehousing models often cost millions of dollars and take years to migrate through design, development, and production-level deployment. Burdened salaries for highly-skilled IT professionals tasked with building and maintaining these systems is often at the peak of professional-services costs, and retention of these employees can prove difficult. Although a request for an executive dashboard had been officially recognized as a project within Austin Energy for years, it had yet to be delivered, primarily due to following the traditional business intelligence and data warehouse model.
No software or hardware solution will replace the need for superlative requirements analysis and project management. However, the greater the complexity of systems, applications and requirements, the greater the potential for delay, scope reduction, or outright failure of an attempted solution.
- From the case study "Austin Energy Case Study: Implementing BI and a Data Mart in Weeks"
Solution
After years of approaching the executive dashboard project in the traditional manner, Austin Energy’s project managers realized that to meet all of these seemingly polar objectives would require a non-traditional approach. In June of 2009 an evaluation of open source technologies that could meet the rigorous demands of the solution proved extremely successful. All of the objectives could be met through the acquisition and deployment of just two technologies, a Business Intelligence suite of tools provided by Jaspersoft, and a revolutionary column-based database engine available from Infobright. Through the use of these solutions, two project managers, working part-time over six weeks, were able to meet all of the requirements of the project and subsequently begin a staged institutionalization of the performance management solution.
Although the application of this solution demonstrated significant savings in time, cost, effort, and maintenance requirements, it is not industry-specific. The products, principle and performance of this project have wide-ranging benefits for any organization or institution.
- From the case study "Austin Energy Case Study: Implementing BI and a Data Mart in Weeks"
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Fuseforward
Economic change, the “green” imperative, and technological advancements are converging to create new markets for “intelligent” infrastructure management solutions on a global scale. Fuseforward International Inc.™, is an infrastructure management solution provider whose technology delivers “intelligent” infrastructure management solutions for asset-intensive enterprises such as governments, utilities and businesses.
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Fuseforward's Intelligent Infrastructure Management™ platform is designed to support advanced asset management, operations management, and “intelligent” system management in asset-intensive enterprises such as cities, utilities, campuses and transportation agencies, as well as their service providers, including facilities management firms and maintenance contractors. Fuseforward is embedding Infobright Enterprise Edition into the ISM Utility Edition that it is developing in partnership with a Canadian utilities provider, Utilities Kingston (UK). This “Smart Utility” solution is designed to support all aspects of utility management, including customer relations, operations management, financial management and performance management, as well as smart metering and Smart Grid technologies.
Challenge
A key component of the ISM application is the powerful analysis capabilities it provides to the user for operations management and optimization. In order to support these capabilities, Fuseforward needed a high performance, cost-effective analytic database to embed within their application to contain the large volume of data their application captures.
Managing large volumes of data effectively is key to the value our Intelligent Systems Management platform provides to our customers.
- Mark Damm, CEO of Fuseforward
Solution
The reduction in hardware costs and administrative effort, coupled with affordable pricing enables Fuseforward to meet their customers’ data management and business intelligence requirements while increasing product margins and accelerating time-to-market. Infobright will enable the ISM platform to capture and retain large volumes of data to support: • Real-time analysis of the performance of complex systems • Analysis of data from smart utility meters • Capture of historical performance data to support benchmarking and long-term analysis
"Using Infobright Enterprise Edition, we can deliver the powerful analysis capabilities that complex organizations need to manage and optimize their operations now and in the future."
- Mark Damm, CEO of Fuseforward
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Database Emailer
Based in Little Falls, New Jersey, Database Emailer is the largest opt-in email database in the United States. Opt-in means that people have expressly agreed to receive product offers and specials by email. The company sells email lists that can be targeted by multiple criteria or “selects,” such as geographic location and demographics (e.g. income, gender, dwelling status). Its customers then market to these lists.
Overview download as pdf
For Database Emailer, its database is its business. The ability to perform fast queries and generate lists for each customer request is essential. Database Emailer ran into serious challenges when its MySQL database grew too large. MySQL is a popular and functional open source database, but the scale of the company’s data was more than the platform could effectively handle for these types of customer queries.
Challenge
Database Emailer needed a database platform that could enable customers to search the database and query the data in multiple ways. Before Infobright, Database Emailer's IT department had to spend about 100 hours per week performing manual queries. The IT staff would run the query directly on their server and determine the number of records that met the customer's criteria. After reporting back to the customer, the number of records was often too small or too large for the customer’s needs, so they had to change the parameters and run another query. This became a time-consuming, expensive process, which slowed down the sales process and cost the company up to $1,000 per day in IT staff time.
“We couldn’t run queries effectively. If someone came to us and wanted to run four or five or six different selects – for instance, women between 30 and 50 years old who make an income of X amount of dollars who live in New York City and own a home – there was no way that could be run on the website.”
- Al Inga, President
Solution
In response to Database Emailer’s request for help, MySQL recommended Infobright's self-managing, scalable database that is optimized for analytics and integrated with MySQL. With the new, robust Infobright database, Database Emailer could offer online queries of the entire database, including the United States and Canada. The company has seen their business triple since implementing Infobright and providing immediate response to customers.
“Business has increased since March probably 200 or 300 percent. Interestingly enough, the money that was going towards the IT people is now heading towards customer service. We actually have more customers now than ever, and more sales calls coming in. So sales and customer service are increasing, but IT costs have substantially decreased.”
- Al Inga, President
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Communications Service Provider
This regional communications company, a subsidiary of one of the world’s largest telecommunications companies, strives to deliver the best service and solutions to its 2+ million customers. They provide a wide range of services – from landline to mobile, and from broadband to TV and entertainment.
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As with all communications service providers (CSPs), this company generates massive amounts of data every day. Call Detail Records, or CDRs, capture information about every call made by each of their 2 million customers. While CDRs are used for customer billing, the accumulated data has great value to CSPs in terms of analyzing the data to drive business decisions. CSPs typically analyze this data to identify trends in customer behavior, optimize pricing, develop marketing campaigns, eliminate fraud and revenue leakage, and optimize network capacity during peak call times.
Challenge
The company’s challenge was to keep more data online, at less cost, without sacrificing query performance. In order to do so, they also needed a solution that could load data at a faster rate than their existing system. With a goal of being able to store 2 -3 years worth of rolling CDR data, estimated to be about 4.2 billion rows of data, this CSP evaluated different approaches to meeting the challenge.
Infobright enables us to put more data online and make it accessible without requiring the attention other databases do.
- Manager, Business Intelligence and Data Management
Solution
The company’s testing resulted in a decision to use Infobright Enterprise Edition for this critical application. Now in production, they have seen the following benefits: • Data compression of 15:1 (raw data to data size on disk in Infobright), resulting in significant savings on their SAN-based disk storage. • Achieved goal of maintaining fast query response while keeping far more data online. • Query response time remained constant as the size of the database grew. • Very high data load speed using the Infobright loader, which was key to being able to keep more CDR history online. • Reduced administrative effort and cost. With no indexes to build or maintain, no data partitioning or database tuning, DBAs can spend their time on projects that leverage their advanced skills, rather than on tedious database maintenance.
Infobright’s performance, lower hardware costs and ease of maintenance are of great benefit to us.
- Manager, Business Intelligence and Data Management
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bwin Games
bwin Games AB is a leading developer of digital poker products and is a subsidiary of the bwin Group. The bwin Group has over 20 million registered customers in more than 25 core markets. On a number of different platforms, the Group offers sports betting, poker, casino games, fortune and skill games, as well as audio and video streams of top sporting events such as the German Soccer League. Full details about the Company can be found on its investor relations website at www.bwin.org
Overview download as pdf
bwin Games AB, a leader in the development of digital poker products, has deployed Infobright Enterprise Edition (IEE) to manage the increasing volume of data generated by its online poker business. IEE is enabling bwin Games to store and quickly mine terabytes of data, without putting a heavy burden on the company’s hardware or administrative resources.
Challenge
bwin Games develops and maintains the software for one of the world’s largest poker networks, Ongame Network. bwin handles up to 45,000 concurrent poker players, with more than 10 million poker hands per day, over 70,000 deposits and withdrawals processed daily, as well as up to 6,000 financial transactions per second. As the amount of data generated by several million registered customers in over 25 core markets has increased, bwin Games required a cost-effective way to keep up with storage and processing demands.
“IEE’s compression capabilities are enabling us to store far more information than we could before, and we can run intensive queries in minutes instead of days ― all with minimal set-up and administration needed.”
- Carl Klingberg, managing director of bwin Games AB
Solution
With Infobright Enterprise Edition in place, bwin Games is able to store up to a year of poker data, process more than half a gigabyte of information per day, and run detailed, real-time queries that enable the company to make quicker, well-informed business decisions. The Infobright solution, which was successfully deployed at bwin Games in only a few hours, seamlessly integrates with the company’s MySQL database from Sun Microsystems.
“We honestly didn’t think this level of performance was possible, especially at such a reasonable price point. Infobright has delivered beyond our expectations.”
- Carl Klingberg, managing director of bwin Games AB.
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Mavenir
Mavenir Systems provides innovative mobile convergence solutions that enable mobile operators to offer subscribers new and enhanced services and applications. The Mavenir mOne Convergence Platform allows mobile operators to accelerate the launch of Converged Voice and Messaging services. The integrated solution blends IMS services such as Presence and Instant Messaging with SMS, MMS, Email and Web 2.0 applications to accelerate the adoption of mobile social networking and content delivery. Headquartered in Richardson, Texas, Mavenir has sales, business development and R&D and operations facilities in India, China and Europe. For more information see www.mavenir.com.
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Mavenir’s SMS application is an example of a very fast-growing class of applications that combine both a vertical application that captures large volumes of data, and an embedded data mart/analytic database used for business analytics. The application captures, stores and enables analysis of SMS messages. In order to offer its customers a way to quickly retrieve detailed messaging records when needed for operational analytics, customer service or regulatory requests, Mavenir Systems sought a scalable, cost-effective embedded analytic database capable of storing up to 90 days worth of messages.
Challenge
The Mavenir solution was designed to handle very large data volumes per day, as evidenced by a recent announcement that it has been deployed by four mobile operators in Asia, Europe and North America, with capacity in excess of 3 billion messages per day. Peak periods like Chinese New Year can generate over 70 million messages in an hour. The system captures all of the SMS message details as well as information about where the SMS originated from, where it was sent to, which network was used etc. The data is loaded from event/log files every 5 minutes, which makes the data available to the wireless carrier in near-real time. Mavenir's goal was to drive more revenue by offering a solution to mobile operators that allows them to retrieve detailed SMS records for customer service and regulatory compliance. The need to quickly load and store large volumes of detailed data, along with the ability to make that data available for analysis within minutes, were key to determining the kind of embedded data mart was required. Mavenir also needed a solution that could store 90 days worth of data with a small hardware footprint, and could handle a projected 70% growth rate in mobile messaging. Additionally, cost-effectiveness including low storage and license costs was also a key consideration.
Data storage is a big issue for mobile operators, and it’s only going to get more challenging as the use of messaging continues to explode.
- Payam Maveddat, vice president of product management at Mavenir Systems
Solution
Mavenir selected Infobright Enterprise Edition to meet their current needs and future growth requirements. They can load 20,000 SMS records per second at peak capacity in the initial release, and manage massive messaging traffic for its customers on a minimal hardware footprint. The embedding of Infobright within the application provides additional benefits Mavenir’s customers – much less hardware due to the high rate of data compression, fast query response without indexes, data partitioning or manual tuning, and no need for DBA resources to manage the database on an ongoing basis. This case study also demonstrates the value of the increasing trend toward open source, as Mavenir’s ability to immediately download an open source version of Infobright enabled them to quickly assess its fit for their need. As is the case with all companies today, time to market is critical and the ability to download and test new software options shortens time-to-delivery and production. Mavenir has successfully implemented their vision of offering a distinctive product to a highly competitive market that provides much greater insight into subscribers, traffic and network trends and issues at 20% of the cost of competitive solutions. They have won major wireless carriers such as MetroPCS and Viettel based on this solution, which is driving the growth of Mavenir’s business.
"Infobright offered the only solution that could handle our current data load and scale to accommodate a projected growth rate of 70 percent, without incurring prohibitive hardware and licensing costs."
- Payam Maveddat, vice president of product management at Mavenir Systems
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Smiley Media
Smiley Media brings online advertisers and content publishers together, matching demographic data with advertising content to maximize revenue for both constituencies. Working with more than 2,000 customers and business partners, the company serves online ads to end users, optimizing place offers and site traffic. For more information, please visit www.smileymedia.com
Overview download as pdf
Smiley Media has selected Infobright Enterprise Edition (IEE) to manage the increasing volumes of data that drive its online advertising business. IEE enables Smiley Media to run reports on a much larger data pool than the company was able to manage with its previous solution, and generate reporting results up to three times faster.
Challenge
In the last several years, Smiley Media's business has grown to such a degree that its existing solution could not keep up with the huge amounts of data that needed to be analyzed in order to understand and report on page view demographics, impressions generated and online user behavior. Prior to deploying IEE, Smiley Media could only generate reports on one month's worth of data at a time, and engineering resources had to be engaged in order to create different views of the data.
We've had a 50 percent increase in impressions generated during the first quarter of this year alone.
- Tuan Ta, senior systems engineer at Smiley Media
Solution
IEE enables Smiley Media to run reports on a much larger data pool than the company was able to manage with its previous solution. In addition, multiple reports can be run concurrently, and include data generated during three and six month time spans. Smiley Media is also running reports three times faster with IEE and their users can create new queries without IT intervention. Once the solution is fully rolled out, the company plans to provide access for up to 20 users.
Infobright is enabling us to cost effectively support the data management requirements that are accompanying this growth, particularly the need to quickly churn out reports.
- Tuan Ta, senior systems engineer at Smiley Media
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Laurentian
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Swissport
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Twenga
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Mens Warehouse
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Penson Worldwide
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Trading Screens
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ATS Group
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Sulake
Sulake Corporation is an online entertainment company focused on virtual worlds and social networking. Sulake’s main product is Habbo, the world’s largest virtual world and online community for teenagers. There are localized Habbo communities in 32 countries on six continents. To date over 117 million Habbo characters have been created and 10.4 million unique users worldwide visit Habbo each month. Sulake has offices in 15 countries. Its headquarters is situated in Helsinki, Finland. Currently the company has over 300 employees worldwide. For more information, visit www.sulake.com and www.habbo.com. Read what Sulake's CTO has to say about his use of Infobright technology Osma's Blog.
Overview download as pdf
Some 32 countries on six continents play host to Sulake’s localized Habbo communities, and over 10 million unique users worldwide visit Habbo each month. Sulake is focused on offering the most engaging social entertainment solutions, and to fully understand what its communities need, the company must analyze huge amounts of data every day.
Challenge
As Sulake's environment is extremely fast paced and changes constantly, they roll out a substantial upgrade to the product each month. At that pace of development, getting feedback on results in less than 24 hours is crucial to success. Sulake needed to increase productivity by reducing the wait time for analytics processing. They also wanted to reduce the amount of server and storage infrastructure required for their growing data volumes.
Unfortunately, our existing infrastructure couldn’t adapt with our growth pace. Ad-hoc queries were too slow, introducing new metrics was cumbersome, and changing the system was too costly. We needed more speed, and simply throwing more hardware at the problem wouldn’t be enough.
- Osma Ahvenlampi, chief technology officer for Sulake
Solution
Sulake opted for Infobright’s analyst data warehouse solution because it offered the performance needed along with a full feature set and a low total cost of deployment. It also fit easily into the company’s existing infrastructure based on Linux, MySQL and Java toolchains. The company was able to go straight from a proof of concept to a production implementation, and after just a couple of weeks began analyzing its first dataset exclusively using Infobright.
"Infobright will clearly reduce the amount of time required for our analytics processing, which will make our teams more productive and allow us to respond more quickly to the demands of our communities. Infobright’s efficient use of servers will also dramatically reduce our hardware requirements."
- Osma Ahvenlampi, chief technology officer for Sulake
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RBC Capital Markets
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Canada Border Security
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Effective Measure
Headquartered in Australia, Effective Measure provides cutting-edge digital audience measurement, website rankings, Internet demographics and market intelligence for website publishers, media agencies and digital marketers. The company, which is now offering services in Australia, plans to expand into Asia/Pacific and the Middle East.
Overview download as pdf
Effective Measure's business requires analyzing massive amounts of data. To support their growing business they needed a highly scalable solution that offered broad capabilities and excellent performance but at an affordable price point.
Challenge
The company is already processing 140 to 150 million records per day, just in the Australia market, and has automated daily, weekly, monthly and quarterly reports. Effective Measure needed a solution that could scale quickly and easily as they expand their business to Asia/Pacific and the Middle East.
As a new company whose business is analyzing massive amounts of data, we needed a highly scalable solution that offered all the capabilities and performance possible but at an affordable price point
- Scott Julian, chief executive officer, Effective Measure
Solution
Effective Measure selected Infobright Enterprise Edition (IEE) to power its new digital audience benchmarking solution. Effective Measure selected IEE because it delivered the powerful, scalable, easy-to-use analytic data warehouse capabilities the company needed at a much lower cost of ownership than any other solution.
“We looked at other solutions, but only Infobright combined the capabilities we needed with an attractive price and dramatically lower hardware requirements, ensuring the lowest possible total cost of deployment.”
- Scott Julian, chief executive officer, Effective Measure
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1024 Degres
1024 Degrés is a pioneer in digital marketing and electronic customer relationship management (eCRM). Their services provide a complete analysis of customer behavior over the whole life time, requiring the analysis of massive amounts of data and integration with a company’s internal information systems. 1024 Degrés selected Infobright based on its ability to efficiently and rapidly extract valuable customer behavior information from the huge volume of data collected, without taxing the IT budget and staff of 1024 Degrés.
Overview download as pdf
1024 Degrés works with e-commerce merchants and media sites to achieve commercial and business success on the Web. While some organizations deliver a "360° view" of a company’s customers, 1024 Degrés is the first company to deliver not only a full-circle customer view, but also a complete analysis of their behavior over the whole customer life time. By integrating precise customer analysis—including their interests and their levels of engagement—and integrating this with internal information systems, the company helps its clients deliver the actionable content designed to keep customers connected. The company is based in Paris, France.
Challenge
The company’s patent-pending technology helps its customers understand and analyze the complete lifecycle of customer interactions, weaving together massive amounts of data from multiple sources, including on-line customer interactions as well as data from the company’s internal customer information systems. 1024 Degrés uses this information to drive the most relevant information to customers in real time. 1024 Degrés needed the ability to efficiently and rapidly extract valuable customer behavior information from the huge volume of data collected, while still protecting each consumer’s right to privacy. In addition, French regulations dictate that consumers always have the right to immediately access, modify or delete personal data—including any links to these data. 1024 Degrés also required a solution that would fit within their budget and staff constraints.
"Gathering and analyzing web-based customer interactions over the lifetime of a customer is an extremely complex problem in France, where government regulations dictate that consumers always have the right to immediately access, modify or delete personal data—including any links to these data."
- Dominique Monet, Chief Executive Officer of 1024 Degrés
Solution
1024 Degrés selected the Infobright data warehouse solution based on its ability to efficiently and rapidly extract valuable customer behavior information from the huge volume of data collected, while still protecting each consumer’s right to privacy, as well as providing ownership and control of any personal information, as required by French regulations. After evaluating a number of data warehouse solutions, only Infobright could deliver the right levels of speed and precision, without taxing the IT budget and staff of 1024 Degrés.
"Only Infobright could deliver both the scale and efficiency we needed to tell our clients what motivates their customers at any given moment, while also keeping them in compliance with French regulations."
- Dominique Monet, Chief Executive Officer of 1024 Degrés
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Canadian Space Agency
The Canadian Space Agency (CSA) was established in 1989 by the Canadian Space Agency Act. As part of it duties, CSA conducts testing of satellites against varying conditions to confirm viability in space. The testing involves understanding measurements against strict tolerances and analyzing massive amounts of data. Before Infobright, CSA could only sample data at intervals, creating a risk of missing critical information.
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The Canadian Space Agency operates like a government department. The president is the equivalent of a deputy minister and reports to the Minister of Industry. The president oversees five core functions: Space Programs, Space Technologies, Space Science, Canadian Astronaut Office, Space Operations. He also looks after six executive functions (Audit, Evaluation and Review; Corporate Management; Communications; Strategic Development; External Relations; Government Liaison) and three Corporate functions (Legal Services, Administration, and Human Resources). The mandate of the CSA is to promote the peaceful use and development of space, to advance the knowledge of space through science and to ensure that space science and technology provide social and economic benefits for Canadians
Challenge
In order to increase the precision of testing and qualifying the space-worthiness of satellites and other space-faring systems, the CSA’s David Florida Laboratory (DFL) developed a specialized data acquisition system that acquires, monitors, records and analyzes passive intermodulation (PIM) and multipaction events. PIM can interfere with the operation of multi-channel high power communication satellite and terrestrial systems. Multipaction can result in RF vacuum breakdown, leading to component degradation and the eventual failure of a satellite in space. Both conditions must be accurately measured and analyzed to be effectively mitigated. The testing involves understanding measurements against strict tolerances. As data is produced at 200,000 measurements per second, CSA could not capture and store the data points and then query in a timely manner throughout a test. Their previous solution was only able to sample the data at intervals, creating a risk that of missing data that would highlight manufacturing flaws in a satellite.
“This [Infobright] solution permits real time compression, compact storage and quick retrieval of relevant data segments using SQL query processing of measured data. Performance of this solution along with its utility in detecting details of PIM and multipaction events has greatly benefited the DFL.”
- From the paper “A DATA ACQUISITION SYSTEM FOR MONITORING OF PIM AND MULTIPACTION EVENTS” authored by Louis-Philippe Girouard. Pierre Charron and Shantnu Mishra of the David Florida Laboratory, Canadian Space Agency
Solution
CSA selected Infobright for its ability to compactly store hours of measured data in its entirety (200,000 rows of data per second per channel) due its industry-leading data compression capability. Infobright also enables users at CSA to run complex queries on large amounts of data, which has been highly effective in detecting the details of potentially harmful PIM and multipaction events.
“What is especially significant is…there was also an event where two distinct spikes were detected within the same interval, something that could not have been detected using the previous technology.”
- From the paper “A DATA ACQUISITION SYSTEM FOR MONITORING OF PIM AND MULTIPACTION EVENTS”
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Polystar OSIX
Polystar is a leading telecommunications supplier, based in Stockholm, Sweden, providing world-class Customer Experience Management (CEM) and Service Assurance solutions to leading telecom operators and service providers world-wide. Infobright’s ability to handle the high volumes of data and fast response times required by Polystar OSIX’s largest customers helps set them apart in a competitive telecommunications marketplace.
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Polystar delivers solutions that provide real-time visibility into the reality of operators’ network quality and their customers’ experience. Polystar empowers network operators—be it for legacy fixed and mobile networks or for new LTE/IMS technologies—to make business-critical decisions with speed and accuracy.
Challenge
The Polystar OSIX Customer Experience Management (CEM) and Service Assurance solutions consist of a number of applications that provide network operators with information about the status of their offered services, network performance and customer behavior. The Polystar OSIX OSS suite must be able to process massive amounts of data, related to key network performance indicators.
“In the highly competitive telecommunications industry, service performance is a key differentiator. As a result, our customers expect our applications to be able to process large amounts of user data and call details. They also demand fast query response times, so that they can stay on top of any issues that can potentially impact their business.”
- Jan Öhman, CEO of Polystar OSIX
Solution
Polystar OSIX selected the Infobright Enterprise Edition (IEE) solution to drive improved analytics for their OSS application suite for fixed, mobile and Voice over IP (VoIP) networks. Polystar chose Infobright for its ability to support the company’s high-volume data warehousing requirements and because of the solution’s interoperability with the MySQL database that Polystar has in place.
“We were very impressed with the Infobright solution’s load speed, its high-data compression rate and its ability to maximize query performance. With Infobright Enterprise Edition in place, we expect to be able to deliver the critical network information that our customers require faster than ever.”
- Jan Öhman, CEO of Polystar OSIX
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TradeDoubler
TradeDoubler is a global digital marketing company, serving more than 1600 online advertisers across Europe and Asia. TradeDoubler optimizes Web marketing campaigns by analyzing Web clicks, impressions and purchases. Analyzing terabytes of data about the results of its programs is central to the company’s success. TradeDoubler selected Infobright Enterprise Edition for its ability to produce analytical results rapidly, seamless interoperability with their MySQL database, and lower total cost of ownership.
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TradeDoubler is a global digital marketing company offering a range of performance-based marketing solutions. TradeDoubler's products and services provide companies with the tools and expertise to drive results online whether they are looking to generate sales or drive brand awareness. Headquartered in Sweden, the company boasts a unique global reach with local offices in 18 countries. With a breadth of expertise across multiple industry sectors and a network of more than 125,000 website publishers TradeDoubler helps deliver online results for over 1,600 advertisers globally including a mix of local and international companies such as Apple Store, Dell, Telia Sonera, eBay and Kelkoo.
Challenge
TradeDoubler’s services require them to execute complex analytic queries against as many as 3 billion rows of data, demanding extensive aggregation. What's more, since the firm studies constantly changing clickstream data, the database had to be continually rebuilt, re-indexed and tuned. Before Infobright, TradeDoubler found that it could not quickly produce the detailed statistics and business analysis required, and in the most extreme cases, could not resolve the queries at all.
“Each month we process and analyze data generated by 20 billion online transactions. We are pleased by Infobright’s performance and the fact that we now can get answers to questions we want to ask. Our IT group is impressed with how easy this solution is to maintain.”
- Ola Udén, CTO of TradeDoubler
Solution
TradeDoubler evaluated Infobright for a statistically intense project. Infobright’s analytic data warehouse software was loaded on a standard Dell SC1950 1U rack chassis server, demonstrating its ability to leverage the capabilities of off-the-shelf hardware. More than 3.2 billion rows of data were loaded into the Infobright solution at an average rate of more than 300,000 rows per second. Though data compression rates varied depending upon data type, Infobright compressed fact tables at a ratio of 20 to 30:1. Comparable operations performed on the company’s Oracle 9 Enterprise Edition database (with partition option) were terminated after approximately two hours of processing. TradeDoubler purchased Infobright for its ability to produce analytical results rapidly, seamless interoperability with their MySQL database, and lower total cost of ownership. Now in production, the Infobright solution has resulted in faster loading speeds, automated indexing, 30X data compression and faster query times.
“Infobright performed extremely well. It handled huge volumes of data and resolved queries faster than I have ever witnessed after years in this industry—and did so using standard hardware.” Read the case study on the TDWI web site HERE.
- Mats Johansson, senior consultant at Lincube Group AB, the organization that conducted the testing.
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JDSU
This is an extract from the full case study that you can download below.
JDSU (NASDAQ: JDSU; and TSX: JDU) innovates and markets diverse technologies that enhance the way people experience the world every day. Their products enable fast, high-quality communications, secure financial transactions, reliable consumer electronics, green energy, differentiated brands, and a host of other solutions. JDSU's annual revenues exceeded $1.3B in 2010, and their 4700 employees are based in over 80 locations worldwide.
In the communications sector, JDSU offers instruments, systems, software, services, and integrated solutions that help communications service providers, equipment manufacturers, and major communications users maintain their competitive advantage. Within the extensive JDSU product portfolio is a suite of Service Assurance solutions that ensure high quality of experience (QoE) for wireless voice, data, messaging, and billing. These products are used by many of the world's largest network operators.
Overview download as pdf
Ensuring high quality of service to customers requires network operators to be able to identify problems and their root cause very quickly. Doing this within the vast volume of data generated every day is a challenge. Equally important is the need to do so without adding high costs from ever-expanding assurance solution hardware infrastructure, such as servers and storage, and from high administrative overhead in the form of expensive database administration costs.
The JDSU Session Trace application, and supporting TDR-Store component, ensures quality of service for mobile networks by enabling network operators to quickly identify network issues and pinpoint the source. Recognizing the challenge with data growth and the need to contain costs, JDSU set out to deliver a new version of their Session Trace TDR-Store component.
Challenge
JDSU's objective was to meet the following goals:
- Support very fast load speeds to keep up with increasing call volume and the need for near real-time data access.
- Reduce the amount of physical disk capacity required by 5x, enabling more data to be stored.
- Significantly reduce overall database licensing costs.
- Eliminate their customers' "DBA tax," which meant that the new solution should require zero maintenance or tuning while enabling flexible analysis.
- Continue to deliver the fast query response needed by Network Operations Center (NOC) personnel when troubleshooting issues and supporting up to 200 simultaneous users.
In order to meet these goals, a decision needed to be made in regard to the underlying database. After investigating the available database options on the market, JDSU decided to test Infobright's high-performance analytic database. Initial testing showed promising results, and Infobright® Enterprise Edition (IEE) was given the green light.
The challenge that JDSU put before Infobright was to capture and enable near real-time analysis of huge volumes of data traversing some of the world's largest carrier networks, at lower cost and without DBA administration efforts. We worked together as true partners, and met the specific goals that JDSU had set.
- Graham Toppin, VP Engineering, Infobright
Solution
The Session Trace application supports a broad set of network protocols, including the latest generation of 4G/LTE networks. Call / session record data streams in at high speeds and populates multiple Infobright instances, based on geographic regions. The application includes a Web-based front end that passes information to a query generator, which then sends the query to the appropriate database instance. For deployment at Tier 1 network operators, each site will store between 6 and 45 TB of data,and the total data volume will typically range from 700 TB to 1PB of data.
By using Infobright, JDSU achieved the following results:
- Met the needs of the largest wireless carriers that require each database instance to ingest data at rates of up to 20,000 TDRs per second (or up to 40,000 database rows per second.)
- Infobright’s deep data compression delivered a 5x space reduction. This was one important factor in significantly lowering the total cost of ownership. In some situations, it also enables customers to choose less expensive internal server storage rather than external arrays, further reducing capital costs associated with the Session Trace application.
- Reduced Total Cost of Ownership:
- The reduction in capital costs from reduced physical storage and the ability to use less expensive internal server storage represent just part of the overall savings from using Infobright.
- A key contributor to high total cost of database ownership is operational expenses arising from the need for expensive, skilled resources like database administrators (DBAs) to maintain and tune the database. Eliminating the need for JDSU customers to use DBA resources results in significant cost reduction.
- Infobright’s licensing costs provide substantial savings for both enterprises and OEMs. JDSU achieved an approximate 3x reduction in database licensing costs compared to their previous TDR-Store design.
Download the full case study to read more of the details.
Using Infobright allowed JDSU to meet the aggressive goals we set for our new product release: reducing storage and increasing data history retention by 5x, significantly reducing costs, and meeting the fast data load rate and query performance needed by the world’s largest network operators.
- Chuck Gruber, Principal Architect, JDSU
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RBC Royal Bank
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Challenge
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Solution
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Xerox
Xerox was using an outsourced service on a periodic basis to perform customer analytics as means to provide key information for sales and marketing. This approach was costly and it took many weeks to get the results. Xerox was looking for a cost-effective, low-management solution that could be quickly implemented in-house.
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Xerox Corporation (NYSE:XRX) is the world's leading document management technology and services enterprise. A $17 billion company, Xerox provides the document industry's broadest portfolio of offerings. Digital systems include color and black-and-white printing and publishing systems, digital presses and "book factories," multifunction devices, laser and solid ink network printers, copiers and fax machines. Xerox's services expertise is unmatched and includes helping businesses develop online document archives, analyzing how employees can most efficiently share documents and knowledge in the office, operating in-house print shops or mailrooms, and building Web-based processes for personalizing direct mail, invoices, brochures and more.
Challenge
Xerox was looking to implement an in-house Analytic Data Warehousing solution for improved customer insight. The company needed a timely way to perform market analytics on customer data, which was stored in several outsourced storage repositories. In addition, each of them was based on different database technology. Xerox had been using an outsourced service, but completing a new analysis was requiring significant lead-time (many weeks) and building custom reports through an outsourcer was costly. Xerox was also unable to do ad hoc queries, as the outsourced service delivered the results of pre-defined reports. Xerox wanted to bring the data in-house but needed to find a solution that was less complex and easier to administer than a traditional data warehouse. They also needed a solution that could easily load data from disparate database management systems. Xerox needed to be able to analyze sales data at any time, and in a variety of ways, utilizing a Business Intelligence tool (Cognos).
The key benefit of using Infobright is improved marketing efficiency and effectiveness.
- Gerry Tomlinson, Manager, Business Intelligence, Xerox.
Solution
Xerox implemented the Infobright solution, and in six weeks the solution was in production. Implementation was easy, as it required no re-structuring of data models and the data from the disparate databases was easy to load into the new system. Infobright was able to interface to Cognos ‘out of the box’ with no customizations, which allowed Xerox to use the BI tool to run ad hoc queries. The Infobright solution met Xerox’s goal of low cost of ownership, as it requires minimal ongoing management support. In addition, it allows them to supports real time ad hoc queries without intervention by their DBAs. time, and in a variety of ways, utilizing a Business Intelligence tool (Cognos).
Infobright will allow Xerox to perform sophisticated market analytics in-house so we can identify and react to market changes quickly and provide clear direction to external marketing service providers.
- Gerry Tomlinson, Manager, Business Intelligence, Xerox.
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Yahoo!
Yahoo! is the premier digital media company. Their business focus is on creating a content, communications, and community platform that delivers rich consumer experiences and advertising solutions across all digital screens. Yahoo attracts more than half a billion consumers every month in more than 30 languages—making Yahoo! one of the most visited and trusted Internet destinations.
Overview download as pdf
Setting the prices for display ads is the responsibility of Yahoo!'s Pricing and Yield Management (PYM) team. They are also responsible for pricing analytics and pricing-yield business operations for all of Yahoo!'s display advertising business. This involves sophisticated analysis of very large volumes of impression-level Web data by highly skilled analysts within the PYM team. With the move toward finer and finer ad targeting (using more attributes to determine which ad to display), the process of pricing has become more complex as the team must price each specific set of attributes. In addition to setting the right price in the guaranteed
display ad market, the PYM team must also determine how impressions are monetizing in their secondary marketplace—this is required for establishing appropriate pricing and deal evaluation.
Challenge
Not surprisingly, as more attributes are captured for analysis, the volume of data collected every day continues to increase. For the PYM pricing analysis application, that equals 20 to 30-million records per day. Previously Yahoo! used a traditional row-based database to capture and store the data. However the high cost and high administrative effort it took was a barrier to storing all of the data the PYM team needed. Only summary data of user behavior could be stored, and the data history was limited to 30 days. This severely limited the number of attributes that could be considered in the pricing analysis, thereby limiting the analysis the PYM team could do and making the analysis less accurate. The PYM team decided they needed a new database to meet their needs:
- Allow the storage of all of the detailed impression data instead of only summary data
- Extend data history to 6 months versus the 30 days they could keep previously
- Provide fast queries and flexible ad-hoc analytics
- Reduce the amount of hardware required
- Reduce the administrative effort involved in managing and tuning the database
Using Infobright allows us to do pricing analyses that would not have been possible before.
- Arvind Hariharan, Senior Director Pricing and Yield Management
Solution
Now in production, the Infobright database has allowed the Yahoo! PYM team to meet the requirements listed above:
- Store all detailed data: Yahoo! is currently loading close to 30-millions records every day. This now includes all of the detailed data that the team wanted to have access to, rather than just the summary information they were able to store previously.
- Keep much more history, in much less space: Yahoo! now has the ability to store the six months of data they need for the most accurate analysis. This means that there are about 6 billion records in the database. What's more, as Infobright provides outstanding levels of data compression, the approximately 6TB of raw data that has been loaded only uses 600GB on disk (10:1 compression).
- Faster queries, flexible ad-hoc analytics: Queries that took several minutes previously now run in seconds with Infobright.
- Easier to maintain and support: This allows the PYM team to focus on their primary responsibilities rather than devoting effort to database maintenance.
We now have access to all of our detailed Web impression data, and we can keep 6x the amount of data history we could previously. This enables us to quickly determine the value of certain combinations of attributes and price accordingly.
- Arvind Hariharan, Senior Director Pricing and Yield Management
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Next Steps
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