Published on 30-Mar-2012
Customer:
Kelley Blue Book
Industry:
Automotive, Retail
Deployment country:
United States
Solution:
Business Analytics, Data Warehouse, Smarter Computing
IBM Business Partner:
MicroStrategy, SAS
Overview
Karen Simmons and Dan Ingle from Kelley Blue Book are back to share the value that they see in the IBM Netezza High Capacity Appliance, which led them to purchase the product for use with their existing IBM Netezza 1000 environment
Business need:
The main challenge facing the organization as a whole, has been a question of how to deal with the extreme growth seen in areas like, mobile applications and social media, and how to use this information to their advantage. This is where Netezza comes in.
Solution:
Kelley Blue Book adds an IBM Netezza High Capacity Appliance to their existing IBM Netezza 1000 enviornment.
Benefits:
Kelley Blue Book can use this new IBM Netezza High Capacity Appliance for clickstream and impression data, knowing it will fit with their existing IBM Netezza platform and be cost effective.
Video
In this video, Kelley Blue Book's Dan Ingle (SVP of Analytic Insights and Technology) and Karen Simmons (Senior Director of Data Warehousing) share the value that they see in the IBM Netezza High Capacity Appliance, which led them to purchase the product for use with their existing IBM Netezza 1000 environment.
Video Transcript
Dan Ingle, Senior Vice President, Analytic Insights & Technology, Kelley Blue Book: One of the bigger challenges for us as an organization has been, you know, how do we deal with the extreme growth you see in mobile applications and in social media? And how do we actually turn that around and actually utilize that to our advantage so we can give consumers a better experience and provide our advertisers with a more valuable asset to get in front of consumers? And our ability to actually collect and manipulate and analyze that data is critical today, but as we look at the next you know 6-12 months, it is going to become even more critical in terms of our ability to turn that data around quickly and be able to make meaning and make sense out of all that data for our advertisers.
Karen Simmons, Senior Director of Data Warehousing, Kelley Blue Book:
Currently we are at a stage where we have to make a decision on what we’re going to be able to store and we have to get to a level of “when do we aggregate?” and “can we just do sampling?” because our data sets are getting so large.
Dan Ingle: We started looking at alternative ways to try and continue to scale on our environments and a lot of those alternatives didn’t have a lot of draw for me because it requires us to bring in new technology and train people in new skill sets.
Karen Simmons: The way I would explain the Netezza High Capacity Appliance to someone who has never heard of it, I use the analogy of cars. So it would be a Porsche Cayenne, which equates to our TwinFin-12, versus the Cadillac Escalade, which would be the High Capacity Appliance. So both are fast but the Porsche Cayenne is faster and both have a lot of capacity.
Karen Simmons: If I had the Netezza High Capacity Appliance today, we’d use it in several different ways. We would use it to store new data sources such as our classified listing data and our inventory data, which are totally new data sources to Kelly Blue Book. We’d also have now an option of “when do we need to aggregate?” and “when do we need to sample our large data sources?” for clickstream and impression data.
Dan Ingle: I can bring in a High Capacity Appliance, that appliance runs in the same platform as our TwinFin-12. I know it fits into our current data warehousing and BI ecosystem, it works with other tool sets like Informatica, MicroStrategy and SAS so I don’t have to go over those hurdles, so it actually provides a good integrated way for us and also a very cost effective way for us to continue to scale on our environment.
Karen Simmons: The other thing I would say about the High Capacity Appliance is that it’s a really cost effective solution and the reason that’s cost effective is because it can store a lot of data which we need some solution for, for archive, backup and also for disaster recovery.
Dan Ingle: The alternative that we are starting to consider something like a Hadoop type solution, but Hadoop is a completely different platform. You know its completely different software it runs on completely hardware and takes a completely different skill set, which we don’t currently have in house. It also requires a high touch from an administrative perspective and we are used to operating a Netezza environment where our, you know our “administration” you know penalty on that box is really low. If I go with the solution like Hadoop I know that the administrative costs become much higher and I have to worry about “how do I staff for that?”
Karen Simmons: When I first learned about the new Netezza high capacity appliance I was really excited. I said, “I want one, when can I get it and what kind of discount can I get?!”
Products and services used
IBM products and services that were used in this case study.
Software:
IBM Netezza High Capacity Appliance