To successfully deliver timely and beneficial information to its customers, Polk must process millions of rows of data and disseminate it to executives and field staff—who work directly with dealers—through easily readable platforms. To enhance customer service, Polk needed to provide field staff with the capability to interact with data in multiple ways and broaden its analytical scope. In addition, the company wished to enhance its processing speed and leverage new features—such as mobile and online capabilities— to ensure its data reached more users.

To achieve its goals, Polk began testing Oracle Exalytics In-Memory Machine through a technology preview program. With the Oracle Exalytics In-Memory Machine, Polk developed a fact table with approximately 600 million rows and two terabytes of data. The company acquired online hosting applications—including mobile device hosting—to quickly provide market performance information to executives and field users, who meet with automobile manufacturers and dealerships. The testing indicated that Oracle Exalytics would enhance Polk’s data processing speed, which would enable users to interact with data more efficiently, without being slowed by wait times. Leveraging these capabilities could also enable Polk to maximize the number of customers it reaches and enhance its revenue opportunities.

Another key feature Polk hoped to provide for its customers was greater business intelligence.  Oracle Exalytics provides trellis charts, which can enable Polk to represent large amounts of data on a single page. This lets customers see performance across all their segments at one time, which can help them to better identify changes in their business. In addition, Oracle Exalytics can enhance data analytical capabilities by enabling Polk to create correlations—such as geographic areas—across all data sets to deliver more intelligence on how the automotive industry is performing.

Soon after commencing participation Oracle's Technology Preview Program for Oracle Exalytics In-Memory Machine, Polk realized a 10 times, out-of-the-box, improvement on cache misses—with 100 times improvement on certain drill paths. To further optimize system performance, Polk leveraged Oracle Exalytics’ summary aggregate adviser, which analyzes data usage patterns and provides summary aggregate tables in memory, which would enable staff to spend less time reviewing usage logs and more time focusing on other pertinent activities. Finally, Polk connected Oracle Exalytics through InfiniBand to its previously installed Oracle Exadata Database Machine environment, further improving test performance.