Inferenda

Inferenda: Database Performance Translates into Growth for Leading Direct Marketing Data Services Company

When a data services company was getting complaints like this from their top wholesale client, their executives quickly got the message that they were having a performance problem. That was the situation in which Inferenda, a leading provider of marketing data services solutions found themselves. Formed in 2006, Inferenda has deep roots in both the business of Direct Marketing and the technology of Database Management. The company prides itself on its ability to support its customers, typically high-volume consumer marketing organizations or data resellers, through reliable self-service data count, fulfillment services and master Database Management. Their services help customers win more business and increase profitability.

Data Quality - the Inferenda Difference in the Data Services Market

Inferenda differentiates itself in the crowded marketing data services market by really understanding the data that they sell and, specifically, the business value of clean data. “You can buy lists from hundreds of different companies around the world,” says Michelle Tilton, VP of Marketing at Inferenda, “and most of them are riddled with out-of-date and inaccurate or duplicate data. Because we really understand both market needs and best-practices in data management, we add a persistent ID to each record that means when people change telephone numbers, addresses, e-mails, get married, etc. data is appended to their original record and no duplicate record gets created. This makes for better quality data and that’s what our customers expect from Inferenda.”

Customer Self-Service Performance Expectations Not Met

However, in a competitive and time-sensitive market, quality of data must be combined with very fast turnaround. To deliver this service and provide a high-quality customer experience, Inferenda developed a self-service application for their high-volume customers called QueryFlex. QueryFlex provides powerful selfservice capabilities for data count and order generation, processes that could involve either individual or sequential queries that comb through over a billion records stored in multiple databases.

Inferenda and their QueryFlex customers often run up to 1,000 queries a day, many of which involve complex sorts and join across multiple database tables totaling over a billion rows of data. These queries are often iterative, meaning that once QueryFlex has returned a record count to the customer or sales person, they will modify the search criteria to either increase or limit the number of records that they want to purchase. Although these are completely new searches, the customer’s expectation is that they will return an immediate result. Meeting this expectation is a key aspect of delivering a high-quality customer experience.

Innovative Approach to Evaluating Options

Inferenda’s IT infrastructure was based on the Microsoft stack, but as their data volumes grew, their Microsoft SQLServer database was unable to keep pace with their business and specifically of the needs and expectations of their QueryFlex customers. “We manage over a billion rows of data”, said Pam Lang, President at Inferenda, “and it’s growing at 20% a year. We needed to migrate to a more scalable, faster and efficient database to support our move to a self-service model, but our problem was how could we support Inferenda’s core business at the same time as we modeled and tested the self-service environment?”

To solve this problem, Pam and her database team hit on an innovative solution. They decided to harness the power and flexibility of Amazon’s Cloud infrastructure to emulate their self-service environment and used this to test the ability of various databases to meet their performance needs. In addition to meeting their performance needs, the database solution also had to meet Inferenda’s need for efficient, automated indexing to minimize hardware and software tuning.

One of the databases that Inferenda evaluated was Actian Vectorwise. The product was simple to install and quickly impressed Inferenda’s evaluation team with its blazing fast performance and because it needed very little tuning to meet and maintain these performance needs.

Vectorwise – Self-Service Success Enabled!

Once the decision was made to implement Vectorwise, Actian’s Professional Services team worked with Inferenda’s Project Manager to ensure their success. Actian’s experts helped the Inferenda database team test the compatibility of their existing applications on Vectorwise, suggested workarounds where necessary and also suggested a server configuration optimized to get the most out of Vectorwise. With the QueryFlex service successfully running on Vectorwise, plans are now in place to migrate Inferenda’s other major application, PowerFlex, to the Vectorwise platform as well.

The results of running QueryFlex on Vectorwise have been extremely encouraging. For example, queries that used to take 10 to 20 minutes now take only seconds to finish. In Inferenda’s business, such gains in query and throughput performance equate directly to increased business for both Inferenda and their customers as a result of:

• Higher levels of customer satisfaction, because count queries and list generation are happening up to fifty or sixty times faster.
• More time can be spent selling to new and existing customers, not responding to complaints about slow self-service query times.

Another benefit has been that Vectorwise’s efficient indexing means that Inferenda needs proportionally less disk space as they grow their business. This results in a smaller footprint in their outsourced data center, resulting in lower costs per terabyte of raw data.

And those complaints from Sales and Inferenda’s QueryFlex customers? Well, they are now a thing of the past. As President Lang noted, “Vectorwise has solved our big data problem and Actian has proved to be a reliable and responsible business partner. No matter what growth challenges we hit in the coming years, we don’t expect database performance to be one of them.”

About Inferenda Data Solutions, Inc.

Inferenda Data Solutions, Inc. (www.inferenda.com) with deep roots in both Direct Marketing and Database Management, Inferenda brings many years of high-level expertise together in one company to create an elite combination of data and technology. With integrated, customized data solutions becoming highly desirable, Inferenda has also become a preferred provider for some of the industry’s largest Direct Marketing firms, non-profit organizations, retailers and skip tracing agencies. In addition to its headquarters in Plainfield, IL, they also support operations from Fort Myers, FL and Costa Rica.