Epsilon Enhances Business and Marketing Service Offering by Consolidating Mixed Workloads onto High Performance Data Infrastructure
 
 

Epsilon Enhances Business and Marketing Service Offering by Consolidating Mixed Workloads onto High Performance Data Infrastructure

Printer View Printer View

Epsilon is a global leader in delivering direct-to-customer connections that drive business performance. Epsilon’s integrated solutions use the power of rich transactional and demographic marketing data, strategic insights, analytics, award-winning creative and robust digital and database marketing technologies to connect brands with consumers, both online and offline, increasing engagements to generate measurable marketing outcomes.

Epsilon manages customer loyalty programs for major global brands. These programs generate large amounts of data and must be capable of high-performance transaction processing, tracking, configuring, logging, and campaign execution. With many of its information systems experiencing significant growth, and seeing increased demand for real-time reporting and end-user engagement, Epsilon needed a data infrastructure that could scale to meet exponential data growth. It also needed to maintain strict performance and availability requirements for online transactional processing (OLTP) workloads that support its client programs.

Epsilon has selected Oracle Exadata Database Machine for some of its client environments to deliver extreme performance for data warehousing and OLTP workloads, and Oracle Enterprise Manager to enhance system management and ensure high availability to meet customers’ real-time data needs. With Oracle Exadata, Epsilon can deliver highly available marketing solutions that adhere to strict, service-level agreements (SLAs).

As an example, Epsilon provides real-time support for a large US retail customer’s tens of thousands of point-of-sale terminals, which have peak loads exceeding 1,000 Web service calls per second and reaching 500,000 input/output operations per second (IOPS). Each Web service call can include hundreds of transactions, with transactions averaging between 10 milliseconds and 200 milliseconds, and must meet stringent expectations for real-time data processing.

The extreme performance of Oracle Exadata has enabled Epsilon to enhance its business and deliver new value-added services to its client base. Specifically, the company has achieved transactional processing speeds of 5 times to 12 times that of a traditional database solution.

With Oracle Exadata and Oracle Enterprise Manager, transaction times have dropped by nearly 75%. Information is now in real-time, meaning that when a customer checks out at a retail store, the system can instantly calculate a new loyalty program score for the shopper, identify instant savings to which the shopper is entitled, and enable a customer marketing conversation, all before the customer leaves the store―ultimately improving the customer experience, brand perception, and overall brand loyalty and adherence.

Epsilon uses Oracle Enterprise Manager to provide a cohesive end-to-end view for its Oracle Exadata and nonExadata environment—thus ensuring all environments operate at peak performance. With Oracle Enterprise Manager, Epsilon benefits from a single comprehensive management solution for the entire Oracle-based infrastructure, which simplifies both hardware and database administration and enables administrators to focus on tasks of higher value.

 
 

 
 

Challenges

A word from Epsilon

  • “Oracle Exadata has enhanced our service offerings, enabling us to deliver new value-added services by achieving transactional processing speeds that were unthinkable and unaffordable in the past. We have deployed Oracle Enterprise Manager to bring our IT management capabilities up to the task of ensuring the best operational environment for Oracle Exadata. Efficient IT management is more essential than ever in a market that expects real-time data.” – Jeff White, Vice President, Technology, Strategic Database Services, Epsilon

  • Gain the ability to process and analyze, in real time, massive volumes of clients’ sales and behavioral data that drive client promotional and loyalty programs
  • Gain a competitive edge with extreme performance and analytical capabilities that enable retailers and other concerned organizations to significantly improve the impact and effectiveness of their marketing programs
  • Enable clients to enhance loyalty program experiences for consumers, such as immediately updating shoppers’ customer loyalty profiles and points after a purchase
  • Ensure high levels of analytical system and data warehouse performance and availability, even as data volume increases by 40%, year-over-year
  • Adhere to strict SLAs that retail clients and clients in other industries require


Solutions

Oracle Product and Services

  • Achieved a critical competitive advantage with Oracle Exadata Database Machine and Oracle Enterprise Manager, which enable Epsilon to achieve unprecedented data processing speed and efficiency for some retail clients and customers in other industries
  • Gained the real-time processing capabilities and insight required to take clients’ marketing and loyalty programs to new levels of effectiveness 
  • Used Oracle Exadata to provide a major US retailer with real-time support for tens of thousands of point-of-sale terminals, resulting in peak loads exceeding 1,000 Web service calls per second, and reaching 500,000 IOPS per second, to deliver customer satisfaction
  • Acquired extensive performance and analysis tools with Oracle Enterprise Manager to proactively manage and monitor Oracle Exadata, detect emerging problems before they impact end users, and analyze the root causes to accelerate solutions
  • Acquired a standard management solution and policy-driven templates to more efficiently monitor Epsilon’s Oracle databases and attributes, mitigated the need to write and deploy scripts, and automated monitoring and alerts―enabling database administrators to focus on more pertinent and high-value tasks, such as system tuning that delivers efficiencies and additional business opportunities for customers
  • Used Oracle Enterprise Manager, along with Oracle Auto Service Request for Sun System to reduce the time to resolution when system issues occur
  • Ensured high availability for Epsilon’s Oracle databases and enabled real-time replication with Oracle Active Data Guard

Why Oracle

“Oracle offers a complete solution, and Oracle Exadata delivers unprecedented processing speed and efficiency, which we require,” said Jeff White, vice president, technology, Strategic Database Services, Epsilon. “When it came to a management tool, Oracle proved to be our best option. The majority of database administrators are familiar with Oracle Enterprise Manager, and we heavily utilize templates to standardize common tasks and actions. This standardization enables us to save the time that we would have spent writing, maintaining, and deploying scripts, so we can focus on higher-value tasks that provide increased return on investment, such as application system performance and tuning that enhances the customer experience and provides efficiencies to our clients.”

Resources