Mobile phone retailer Carphone Warehouse will next month
replace a four-year-old database with a database server appliance
that is expected to significantly speed up the extraction and
analysis of customer information.
Carphone Warehouse will use the system to run analyses on mobile
phone contract transactions, insurance sales, customer records and
other data. The company is due to go live with Netezza's
Performance Server - in effect, a database, a server and storage in
one box - on 11 December.
Netezza will integrate with Business Objects, Carphone
Warehouse's main business intelligence application. The company
also uses tools from Epiphany for marketing, SAS Enterprise Miner
for predictive modelling, Hyperion for online analytical
processing, and Hyperion Essbase for financial analysis, but these
will remain separate.
Dave Parfett, head of relational technologies at Carphone
Warehouse, said Netezza would let several hundred users analyse
data between 10 and 50 times faster than the company's existing
datawarehouses.
"The data loads do not take as much time as before, and queries
will come back quicker. We hope users will look for more insight
from the data as it comes back in 10 minutes instead of two hours,"
said Parfett.
The firm ran an eight-week pilot for the project. A data
integration tool from Informatica ported data to Netezza, and users
were given two days' training.
Parfett said Carphone Warehouse chose Netezza because of its
price to performance ratio and its speed of deployment - it will
take just two weeks to roll out.
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