Vertica 6

Bruce Yen, the director of business intelligence for fashion giant Guess, stopped by theCube at the HP Vertica Big Data Conference to share his insider perspective on the retailer’s Big Data use case. He talked about his company’s migration from Oracle to Vertica, and explained why aesthetics are equally important for end-users and administrators.

Yen told us that his company made the switch to Vertica because it was unsatisfied with the performance of its legacy Oracle deployment. In his words, “end users and analysts couldn’t ask the right questions with it because it was so slow.”

Performance is important, but it’s not the only major consideration in database deployment. Yen stressed the significance of graphical consistency, which he said is key to improving admin productivity and enhancing customer engagement. Big Data analytics also plays a big role in user experience, he added.

In Yen’s view, “How well do you know your customers?” is the question companies should ask themselves if they want to deliver a compelling online experience for their customers. Enterprise social network specialist Yammer is answering this question by is tapping into its vast data trove.

Pete Fishman, Yammer’s director of analytics, told theCube co-hosts Dave Vellante and John Furrier that his firm developed a set of abstracted analytics tools that empower business users to transform data into insights on their own. These insights are delivered in the form of visualizations, which drive down costs by simplifying the entire analytics process.

“A lot of our philosophy is around cheapness, we want to deliver insights cheaply,” Fishman said. “We don’t go too deep into a lot of our models, our visualizations, this is what gets you the answer in a sort of simplistic fashion.”