Convincing ABNA's service people how things should operate took some work.
"They talked about hiring someone on the customer service team to go online and see who needs feed," Benford sighs. "I said it was a waste of time, just send [the XML message to the order system]. The problem isn't necessarily that end farmer; it's the people who interact with that farmer. They've always done it one way, and they want to keep doing it that way. It's a fairly conservative environment."
PLAYING LEAPFROG Being an early adopter may be the only practical option for companies whose size and resources prohibit costly custom development or megapackage purchases from the big vendors - particularly if the company is looking to find a way to leap ahead of bigger competition. Such was the case for Epsilon, a subsidiary of Alliance Data Systems, which manages large-scale marketing databases and campaigns. Epsilon needed more data-mining power, but for a fraction of the price of a traditional system purchased from a more established vendor.
Through careful searching and a little luck, Epsilon discovered Netezza. In 2000, Netezza was a start-up with an interesting idea: to build a data-mining appliance that would deliver better performance than existing options for far less money. It didn't even have a customer yet, but the product seemed ideal for Epsilon's needs. So after a period of close scrutiny, Epsilon opted to become customer number one.
By being a first customer, Epsilon carried a lot of weight with Netezza, which was always accommodating in making changes. At one point, for example, testing revealed some performance issues for certain customer-critical tasks, according to Epsilon vice president of marketing technology products Mike Coakley. But unlike a large company that might have simply added Epsilon's requests to a long list of fixes for some future upgrade, Netezza went to work immediately. "That's a side benefit of being an early adopter," Coakley says. "You get a lot of input into the product."
Coakley says that putting the Netezza box's benefits into dollars is difficult, but its time-saving features enabled one customer to run seven times more campaigns than in the same period in the previous year using Epsilon's proprietary system. The system has made a competitive difference for Epsilon customers in a couple of critical areas. First, its remarkable speed lets customers run many more variations on campaigns more quickly. Second, the Netezza box also works as an off-the-shelf relational database, replacing the proprietary data store on which Epsilon used to depend. That fact allows Epsilon to connect the app to standard marketing front-end clients, such as Unica and Business Objects, making it easier for customers to manipulate their own data. While he can't provide a percentage, Coakley says that Netezza's product contributed significantly to a $US1 million savings in Epsilon's IT budget by allowing the company to move off an ageing, mainframe-based system.
JUST RIGHT FOR THE JOB Beyond saving money and giving you a leg-up on the competition, sometimes cutting-edge technology is the only thing available that meets your cutting-edge needs. Four years ago, Mark Cotner, then manager of network and application development at Cox Communications, was challenged with building a data warehouse capable of handling a constant stream of diagnostic data from 1.2 million broadband customers. The resulting database would contain some 2 billion rows of data - more than 600GB of information.
Being an engineer, Cotner did what he always did: He started testing. And his results pointed him to what was then an unusual place - that is, the open-source MySQL database. "The particular piece of software that I was working on had some strict performance requirements," Cotner recalls. "It was a very insert-heavy data warehouse, and MySQL [version 3.23.41] was better at data inserts than any other database we tested." MySQL was also available for free, though Cox purchased enterprise-level support from MySQL AB, the company that created the software and ultimately released it as open source. But Cotner says that cost wasn't an issue. "We knew [the database] was going to be important for the business," he says. "We could have spent any amount of money we needed," noting that the data is used regularly by 500 support people and gets some 500,000 internal hits per day.
The warehouse has worked so well that Cotner says Cox plans to expand it soon to hold six months of data instead of three, and to include telemetry information from the company's set-top boxes as well. Ultimately, the database could house 12 terabytes of data.
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