Mail order catalogue company HomeChoice has bought Sybase's relational database for business intelligence, Adaptive Server IQ Multiplex, to run its direct marketing campaigns and support its enterprise information systems requirements. HomeChoice's 50GB Adaptive Server IQ Multiplex data warehouse sits on a Sun Solaris platform.
With a 15-year history, HomeChoice is the largest home shopping group in SA and has developed an extensive range of household goods and fashion merchandise which it markets to the mass consumer market. The company is involved in the direct marketing of an exclusive range of products on a credit and a cash basis, through the use of catalogues via mail order, direct selling or both. Its six merchandise divisions include household textiles, housewares, clothing, appliances, electronics and HC Direct.
Says Dino Philaretou, senior analyst programmer at HomeChoice: "We bought IQ Multiplex in response to our need for more dynamic mailing campaigns. We have since shortened the mailing process from 21 days to four. This has enabled HomeChoice to be more responsive in other areas such as merchandise planning and credit risk assessment, and we have now extended the use of IQ to these areas of the business as well.
"A report that used to take three days to run is now completed in three hours. It has enabled us to create true real-time business intelligence and has vastly improved our technical ability to expand our customer base."
IQ Multiplex is a high-performance relational database designed specifically from the ground up to meet the needs of e-business intelligence and scalability requirements for Web-enabled data warehousing.
"The IQ Multiplex value proposition centres on scalability, speed, flexibility and the lowest cost of ownership," says Julie Tomlinson, Sybase SA marketing manager. "IQ has enabled HomeChoice to work more efficiently by bolstering report generation performance without changing its existing database architecture."
IQ Multiplex delivers ad hoc query performance up to 100 times faster than traditional RDBMSes, is easier to maintain, and does not require time and resource-intensive tuning to obtain performance excellence. It compresses data anywhere from 30% to 60%, and offers near-linear user and data scalability to support thousands of users and terabytes of data.
Prior to the deployment of IQ, HomeChoice's marketing department had to place requests for reports on buying trends and other marketing planning information with the IT department. Because the development of these reports was a specialised function, they could be produced only when developers with the necessary skills had time in between their normal work activities. Philaretou says that by the time the reports were completed, the information requirements had often already changed or been misinterpreted.
IQ was also a good choice because of the relationship it has with Cognos software, the front-end reporting tool used by HomeChoice to generate reports. IQ now enables regular weekly Cognos PowerPlay cubes to be generated and sent to the marketing staff for personal, interactive analysis. PowerPlay, an online analytical processing application (OLAP), enables users to explore large volumes of summarised data with sub-second response times. Users at any business or technical skill level in the company can perform their own multidimensional analyses, create reports, and share them for better decision-making. It draws information from IQ Multiplex to model and build PowerCubes, data sets that contain data and categories according to business rules and calculations.
"This has empowered our marketing team and freed up our IT staff to concentrate on ensuring efficient, quality information, rather than on ongoing report development," says Philaretou.
"In addition, our marketing staff and the HomeChoice management are now able to be more creative in their planning and analysis activities because the information they need is available instantly. Should they want to analyse the information differently, they are able to set reports up themselves."
He adds that the demand for information from IQ is increasing constantly as staff become more aware of its capabilities. The company is now in the process of consolidating and rationalising all reporting and business intelligence activity into the IQ environment.
"Another advantage is IQ's ability to compress data," he adds. "We can now store more customer history online, with the same amount of disk space, making trend analysis more accurate and meaningful. All of this has a positive impact on our campaigns and, ultimately, on our bottom line."
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