Ahold
USA to Implement Cutting-Edge Data Warehousing Appliance
FEBRUARY
01, 2005 -- QUINCY, Mass. -- Ahold USA
should shortly have the terabyte tiger by the tail, as it installs
and implements a faster, more robust customer data warehouse
platform this year.
As part of its
strategy to optimize store operations, increase profitability and
improve customer experience throughout nearly 1,200 supermarkets,
the company will deploy the enterprise-class Netezza Performance
Server data warehouse appliance from Framingham, Mass.-based
Netezza.
Ahold said it selected the
NPS system to perform faster, more complex analyses of its terabytes
of customer and operational data for its store banners, which
include Stop & Shop, Tops Markets, Giant-Carlisle, and
Giant-Landover. "We plan to use the system to perform market basket
analysis with the goal of increasing sales and reducing costs," Al
Clevenger, Ahold USA's dir. of data management, data warehousing
services, told Progressive Grocer.
By
replacing its legacy CDW systems with the NPS data warehouse
appliance, Ahold will be able to run a wide variety of interactive
analyses, while dramatically reducing query times. "The old system's
shortcomings included poor report performance and availability, and
it was a complex environment to support," Clevenger said. "Some of
the improvements we'll see with the new system are an improved
report performance, more system time available because of less
system maintenance and downtime, lower TCO, data freshness, and an
increase in data volume. The NPS system delivers the increase in
performance we wanted without causing us to re-engineer our entire
CDW. Now, we can achieve results in minutes instead of hours,
eliminating stale data and enabling us to be even more flexible and
targeted with our decisions."
The
Netezza Performance Server system is an enterprise-class data
warehouse appliance that architecturally integrates database, server
and storage in one appliance. By placing processing power at the
disk level, analysis occurs at the source at streaming speeds --
analyses that took hours now take just seconds. The NPS system
combines commodity hardware components with Linux and an open source
database, resulting in dramatically lower total cost of
ownership. -- Joseph Tarnowski
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