Market research firm Information Resources Inc. provides its clients with shopper, retail market and consumer intelligence and analysis.  That includes predictive analysis, forecasts and foresights that help companies in the consumer packaged goods industry know their customers, channels and markets.   On top of these, the firm also provides:

• marketing ROI strategies
• brand-portfolio, trade promotion and pricing optimization services
• retail tracking
• merchandising and store-level insights and consulting services

The company counts at least 95% of the Fortune Global 500 companies as its clients.

IRI’s issues

The company wanted to make sure that its data infrastructure would perform at its best and that it would be able to scale this infrastructure later on.  The data infrastructure is what powers the company’s analytical and information services for its clients.  It also wanted to make sure that the analytical applications, as well as the data infrastructure, would be able to handle concurrent users, both from within and outside the company, without slowing down the system.

Moreover, the firm wanted to deal with a single vendor to standardize its IT investments. This way, the company hopes to simplify its IT management and lower total cost of ownership, while also ensuring that it would be able to adequately protect its data and recover these in case there are unforeseen events.

Lastly, Information Resources wanted to hasten the time to value its IT investments.

Why Oracle Exadata Database Machine is Perfect for IRI

Seeing the above requirements, it is obvious that Oracle is the best company to work with.

The company chose Oracle Exadata Database Machine to enhance its ability to give fast insight on customer behavior to their clients, thereby making them stronger than their competition.  They were able to come up with one-off special analytics projects that were not previously possible with their old systems, resulting in additional revenue of US$5 million.

The company was also able to consolidate multiple databases, and replacing old ones.  These databases, which included DB2 and Netezza, were consolidated on the Oracle Exadata Database Machine.  This helped them improve performance and lower IT costs while also simplifying everything now that they have a centralized data warehouse to work with.

Furthermore, the firm was also able to extend their analytics capabilities and make their point of sale data more accurate, allowing them to give better recommendations to retailers and clients.  This in turn helped Information Resources improve their product and marketing promotions.

Not only that, they were able to come up with new analysis services quickly, which allowed them to take advantage of opportunities while also giving the business a competitive edge.

The company was also able to give access to at least 50 internal users and at least 1,000 external users to the data warehouse and data marts without the system’s performance suffering from the concurrent use.  Also, they are using Oracle Advanced Analytics to help scale their analytics even as the volume of data that they work with has increased.

In short, with Oracle, Information Resources was able to consolidate and simplify their data infrastructure, lower costs and even free up floor space in their data center.  All that while getting a boost in both performance and scalability to support the growing firm.

Other improvements and results:

• They were able to improve data compression by up to 8 times using Hybrid Columnar Compression.  This is important because the firm gathered an additional 100 terabytes of data every year.
• Even with the increase of the amount of data that they were working with, the throughput performance increased by as much as twice as compared to before. This means that they are able to process additional terabytes of data more each day.
• They now finish customer segmentations in just a few hours instead of the traditional three to four months.  This helps them get a competitive edge by being able to analyze more combinations of products, market segments or stores.
• They are now able to run mixed and multiple workloads together on the same environment.

Call Four Cornerstone today and find out how you could work with Oracle to get the same benefits and results that IRI has!

To know more about how Oracle helped Information Resources, you can read our source here.

Photo courtesy of IRI.