By Doug Henschen InformationWeek
October 31, 2012 08:00 AM
For complete article, click this link:
Like many retailers, Sears Holdings, the parent of Sears and Kmart, is trying to get closer to its customers. At Sears' scale, that requires big-time data analysis capabilities, but three years ago, Sears' IT wasn't really up to the task.
"We wanted to personalize marketing campaigns, coupons, and offers down to the
individual customer, but our legacy systems were incapable of supporting that,"
says Phil Shelley, Sears' executive VP and CTO, in a meeting with
InformationWeek editors and his team at company headquarters in suburban
Chicago.
...
Fast And Agile
Sears' process for analyzing marketing campaigns for loyalty club members used
to take six weeks on mainframe, Teradata, and SAS servers. The new process
running on Hadoop can be completed weekly, Shelley says. For certain online and
mobile commerce scenarios, Sears can now perform daily analyses. What's more,
targeting is more granular, in some cases down to the individual customer.
Whereas the old models made use of 10% of available data, the new models run on
100%.
"The Holy Grail in data warehousing has always been to have all your data in one
place so you can do big models on large data sets, but that hasn't been feasible
either economically or in terms of technical capabilities," Shelley says, noting
that Sears previously kept data anywhere from 90 days to two years. "With Hadoop
we can keep everything, which is crucial because we don't want to archive or
delete meaningful data."
...
Sears says it has surpassed its initial target to reduce mainframe costs by
$500,000 per year, while also delivering "at least 20, sometimes 50, up to 100
times better performance on batch times," Shelley says. Eliminating all of the
mainframes in use would enable it to save "tens of millions" of dollars, he
says.
...
The MetaScale Mission
Shelley is still CTO of Sears, but if his portrayal of all the things Hadoop can
do sounds a bit rosy, keep in mind that he's also now CEO of MetaScale, a
division that Sears is hoping will make money from the company's specialized big
data expertise.
The rarest commodity that MetaScale offers is Sears' experience in bringing
mainframe data into the Hadoop world. Old-school Cobol programmers at Sears were
initially Hadoop skeptics, Shelley says, but many turned out to be eager and
highly skilled adopters of the Pig language for running MapReduce jobs on
Hadoop. Tasks that required 3,000 to 5,000 lines of Cobol can be reproduced with
a few hundred lines of Pig, he says. The company learned how to load data from
IMS (mainframe) databases into Hadoop and bring result sets back into mainframe
apps. That's not trivial work because it involves a variety of compressed data
format transformations, and packing and unpacking of data.
...
Would-be MetaScale customers in other industries will face different challenges
as they consider embracing Hadoop. Could quick analytical access to an entire
decade of medical record data change how doctors diagnose and treat patients?
Could faster processing spot financial services fraud more effectively?
Companies are focused on choosing and building out the next-generation platforms
that will handle those big data jobs. Will Hadoop be that platform, and will
Hadoop help turn MetaScale into a successful pioneer? That's a story that has
yet to unfold.
~~~
Special note to Blacks Gone Geek readers. I'm featuring this article because I'm
working at Sears where I first heard about Metascale, a Sears company. MetaScale
provides best-in-class, technology-managed services and solutions to enterprises
that are looking to unlock the potential in their data without the time, cost
and complexity associated with traditional big data initiatives. Let me know if
you want to connect with the folks at Metascale.
Milt Haynes, Founder and Chief Knowledge Officer
Blacks Gone Geek
Join The Blacks Gone Geek Community http://www.blacksgonegeek.org/Pages/JointheBlacksGoneGeekCommunity.aspx
No comments:
Post a Comment