Transitioning from Netezza to Actian: A Cost-effective Upgrade
Customer Company Size
Large Corporate
Region
- America
Country
- United States
Product
- Actian Vector
- Netezza
Tech Stack
- Data Analytics
- Database Management
- Big Data
Implementation Scale
- Enterprise-wide Deployment
Impact Metrics
- Cost Savings
- Productivity Improvements
Technology Category
- Analytics & Modeling - Big Data Analytics
- Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Database Management & Storage
Applicable Industries
- Finance & Insurance
Applicable Functions
- Business Operation
Services
- Data Science Services
- System Integration
About The Customer
The Bank is one of the world’s largest financial institutions, serving individual consumers, small- and middle-market businesses, large corporations, governments, and institutions with a full range of banking, investing, and asset and risk management products and services. It is a global leader in corporate and investment banking and trading across a broad range of asset classes. The Bank oversees more than 50 million consumer and small business relationships with more than 5,000 retail banking offices and 16,000 ATMs. Online banking has about 30 million active users along with more than 15 million mobile users.
The Challenge
The Bank’s in-house analytics solution, Netezza, had reached its end-of-life cycle and was not going to be supported by IBM or its channel partners. The Bank needed to create one data repository for all positions across all asset classes, enabling ad hoc analysis of positions and their sensitivity to market factors. The Bank also wanted greater visibility into its risk exposure. It knew that presently, managing client risk and exposure was at 20th-century levels. For example, risk and opportunity value was analyzed via batch data dumps once a day. The Bank needed greater insights, delivered in sub-minute intervals, multiple times a day. It also had additional criteria that had to be met, including improved price/performance levels, ease of development and maintenance, durability, and a palatable TCO.
The Solution
The Bank assessed several analytics platforms against its existing Netezza solution. The evaluation process, conducted over a period of several months, included a performance proof of concept, in which Actian ran on five compute node clusters versus Twinfin, with 24 nodes. Actian required a fraction of the hardware that Netezza was using. There also was a security audit, design previews, compression comparisons, volume handling ability, loading, stress, ad hoc queries, and an in-depth comparison between Actian and Netezza. The Bank was impressed by Actian’s level of expertise and partnership. The ability to seamlessly shift away from end-of-life Netezza while improving the overall quality of its data analysis made the decision an easy one for the Bank. Now, with Actian, the Bank is able to deal with both structured and unstructured data. It can run complex analytics in record time—lowering response times from hours or days to minutes—with on-demand integration, an extensible framework, and higher performance levels.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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