Case Studies: Professional Services

CROSSMARK helps the consumer packaged goods (CPG) industry refine marketing efforts by gathering vast amounts of point-of-sale (POS) information into a data warehouse. As the company prepared to expand its biweekly POS data loads from 300 million rows to 4 billion, it needed a more robust extract, transform, and load (ETL) solution and an easier-to-use reporting solution. It upgraded its data warehouse to Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2005 running on the Microsoft Windows Server™ 2003 Enterprise Edition operating system. CROSSMARK replaced its Business Objects reporting application with SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services. Using SQL Server 2005 Integration Services, the data warehouse, which has grown to more than 3 terabytes, handles the 12-fold increase in data loads without expanding the loading window and gives the company a better view of its business

Acosta provides retail sales and category management services to more than 1,000 manufacturers, including giants such as Clorox, Heinz, and Nestle. To better manage its information, Acosta created a 2.2 -terabyte enterprise data warehouse based on Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2005 Enterprise Edition (64-bit) SP2, and hosted on an HP 9000 Superdome computer with 12 Intel® Itanium® 2 processors. SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services was used to create more than 50 client-specific multidimensional databases. Deployments of the enterprise data warehouse and multidimensional databases are providing Acosta with a number of benefits including rapid ROI through product differentiation, better data view for clients, easier data management with Table Partitioning, enhanced performance with Dynamic Management Views, and 70 percent faster aggregations.

Homestore Web sites provide a national trove of real estate and apartment listings and other housing-related information for more than 9 million unique visitors a month. Believed to be the largest such operation on the Web, the company generates more than U.S.$200 million in annual revenue. To enhance the customer experience, the company created a data warehouse to analyze how its users explore its sites. Initially deployed on a Teradata system, Homestore migrated to a new data warehouse hosted on Microsoft® SQL Server™. SQL Server Analysis Services is used for creating multidimensional data cubes, and reporting is done using SQL Server Reporting Services. Migrating to SQL Server has provided Homestore with a number of benefits, including 20 times faster performance in processing Web logs, a richer reporting environment, the ability to provide faster internal customer service, and the agility to meet new needs.