Delivering the future of analytics, Pentaho Corporation today announced retail customers including RichRelevance, specialist in omnichannel personalization, and The Lucky Group, a venture backed social commerce company, are using Pentaho Business Analytics to gain advantage in a highly competitive holiday retail season. According to a survey released by The National Retail Federation, more than half of the U.S. consumers plan to make at least some of their holiday purchases online this year with 45 percent of consumers planning to use their smartphone and 53 percent on tablets to make holiday purchase decisions, primarily to research products. With Black Friday and Cyber Monday approaching, Pentaho retail customers are well prepared for the surge in demand and strain on both IT and demand for inventory with Pentaho’s scalable and flexible big data analytics platform.
The November 2014 Forrester Research, Inc. Report, US Online Holiday Forecast, 2014 (Access Requires Subscription), states that online sales will reach $89 billion this holiday season. Many retailers have sought to gain a bigger portion of this large purse through improved segmentation. When supported with empirical data, this allows retailers to learn more about customers’ behaviors, preferences and needs, so that they may act on these insights. Even though these companies have a higher degree of personalization, it places a burden on their IT departments to handle the immense volumes of associated data.
Pentaho customers RichRelevance and The Lucky Group will be ready to handle the massive surge in data volumes and internet traffic from desktop and mobile shoppers this holiday season and empower data-driven customer insights. The Pentaho Business Analytics platform offers a future-proof solution to the challenges all retailers will be facing this year; through leveraging big data analytics, customers will be able to capitalize where other retailers may not be prepared.
RichRelevance relies on Big Data visibility to provide a personalized shopping experience for their clients’ ecommerce sites and in store. With some of the nation’s largest retailers as their clients including Costco, Sears and Target RichRelevance is tasked with handling and providing recommendations on two petabytes of data in less than 60 milliseconds to optimize results. This requires building predictive models and leveraging several Big Data technologies including Hadoop, HBase, Kafka, HIVE, YARN and Pentaho.
As a premier e-commerce site for luxury brands, The Lucky Group needed a solution that could quickly slice and dice terabytes of data and millions of daily records leveraging their small team of big data developers and analysts. Using Pentaho with MySQL and HP Vertica, they store, blend and analyze social data with every action on their website, such as clicks, views, transactions, searches, shares, device used and social data, in order to engineer data sets for predictive analytics to improve the customer experience.
«Analytics play a huge role with both customer acquisition and retention,» said Jay Khavani, Senior Manager of BI and Data Warehousing at The Lucky Group. «I’ve been doing analytics in other consumer-facing industries for years and have seen situations where coupon errors went on for days with hundreds of thousands of dollars lost. Using Pentaho, we will be able to keep close tabs on the pulse of our online communities this holiday season, which will help us turn our customer data to better customer experiences.»
«With a four times surge in data volumes and internet traffic expected from both desktop browsers and mobile shoppers this year, Big Data will be an integral for the flourishing, if not survival, of companies big and small,» said Rosanne Saccone, Chief Marketing Officer at Pentaho. «Retailers need greater visibility into their customers, product sales and suppliers, if they want to improve their financial performance and maximize profits over the holidays. Pentaho is helping retail customers prepare to handle the immense volumes of data associated with Cyber Monday, as well as glean insights needed to differentiate themselves in the market, by delivering something core to their customers that others can’t personalization.»