Cardlytics
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4AA4-4218ENW, Rev. 1, August 2016
Because Vertica does not require table locks
and turbo-charges queries, Cardlytics has cut
customer response time from one day to less
than an hour. In the past, transactions loaded
at night. “Now, during the day if we need to
load one billion transactions it isn’t a problem,”
Snodgrass says.
In the past it took 20, 30 or 40 minutes to
return a query typically, and sometimes
as long as 20 hours. Now, the HPE Vertica
analytics database returns queries in one-half
to one minute on average—five minutes at
most. Vertica now returns a typical query
40-to-80x faster than the legacy platform.
Cardlytics does not consider its investment
in HPE Vertica expensive, estimating that
it has paid for itself entirely in a period of
three months. “An analytics database I was
involved with at another organization was not
as large in scale as what Cardlytics has now,
and that investment was $20 million. With
Vertica I could have built it at 5% of the cost,”
Snodgrass says.
As Cardlytics takes advantage of its analytics
platform, it finds that it can add a lot more
data each week and get more performance
out of it. In the past, the company added 200
million records per week. Now that it has its
HPE Vertica platform in place, Cardlytics is
able to add an additional 2 billion records
per week. “I knew I was getting speed and
performance. What I didn’t realize I was
getting was a technology that seamlessly
integrates into the ever-changing Big Data
environments,” says Snodgrass.
Not only is there more data, but analysts or
anyone asking a question of Vertica are able
to rapidly analyze this voluminous data. The
frustrations associated with working on an
underperforming data warehouse have been
eliminated. Instead of waiting for returns on
queries, the team can ask more insightful
questions and perform additional analysis
that ultimately leads to better customer
insight—all in far shorter cycle times. “We
have found out that Vertica works well, and
we are way more productive,” Snodgrass says.
“Since the deployment I have heard nothing
but ‘this is awesome.’”
With the fine-grained analysis enabled by HPE
Vertica, Cardlytics ensures the rewards they
provide to financial institutions’ customers
are precisely targeted and relevant. Better
targeting means more customer engagement,
benefitting customers, Cardlytics, the
advertisers, and the financial institutions that
Cardlytics supports. “I love the reaction we
get from our clients when we provide them
an insight they have always wanted to see
but could never get. We have even had clients
applaud. That leaves a strong impression on
both sides,” Snodgrass concludes.
Customer at a glance
Application
Enterprise Software—Analytic Database
Management
Hardware
• HPE ProLiant DL380 G7 Servers
Software
• HPE Vertica Analytics Platform software
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating
system
Case study
Cardlytics
Industry
Advertising &
marketing services
“HPE Vertica meets all of our
requirements. I know how
much it will cost and how much
we will gain, and I appreciate
that predictability.”
– Craig Snodgrass, Chief Data Oicer,
Cardlytics
“With row-based databases
you have to do indexing.
There are no indexes in
Vertica. You never have to
take it down. Vertica is 100%
reliable and stable.”
– Craig Snodgrass, Chief Data Oicer,
Cardlytics