Success Stories

A Data Dilemma, Size Extra-Large

If you’ve ever shopped at a major grocery store, you’ve encountered Catalina Marketing Corporation. It’s the brains and technology behind the grocery coupons you receive – a marketing powerhouse with a mighty mission: to influence the behavior of consumers wherever and whenever they make purchase decisions.

Through various operating groups, Catalina reaches domestic and international consumers. Their marketing is seen in stores, through incentives, loyalty programs, sampling and advertising messages, at home, through direct mailings, and online, through a merchandising portal.

At the heart of the business is a complex network that generates coupons based on individual buying habits. One of the company's most successful product introductions has been Checkout Direct^®, a database marketing program that uses Catalina’s data warehouse, one of the world's largest electronic real-time databases.

Massive, mission-critical network

At Catalina, the network is the business. Whatever choices it makes for IT infrastructure truly are mission-critical. The need for a reliable, available and scalable solution was at the top of Catalina’s shopping list when it went looking to diversify its database platform. And that is when Catalina began considering IBM solutions offered by Datatrend.

Surveying his environment populated by other vendor boxes running UNIX databases, Kelly Carrigan, Catalina’s Senior Director of Database Architecture, didn’t want all his eggs in one basket. “With the technology landscape changing so rapidly, you can find your foundation changing overnight,” says Mr. Carrigan. “But if it takes six months to introduce a new platform and you’ve got a business to run in the meantime, it’s an enormous risk not to explore proven alternatives. We felt it would be prudent to take action and diversify.”

Shopping for reliability, performance and scalability

One of Catalina’s strategic goals remains to manage accelerated growth and expand its services to manufacturers and retailers. In 1984, five friends, in the related fields of marketing, retailing and scanner-based technology, acted on their conviction that mass couponing methods were inadequate for a fragmented, retailer-oriented market. Since that time, Catalina has grown at a furious pace, extending its customer reach and branching out to Europe.

Sharp growth curve

To date, billions of Checkout Coupon^® certificates have been dispensed in 16,000 supermarkets, representing more than 160 grocery divisions in the U.S. alone. The Catalina Marketing Network now reaches more than 180 million shoppers every week in the U.S. Its revenues have grown at a staggering rate, from $6.5 million in 1988 to nearly $420 million in 2001. The result has been a tremendous growth in data and a constant need to manage that data ever more quickly.

When most companies talk about large databases, they usually mean millions of rows of data. But Catalina's database is on the scale of 500-700 billion rows of data, with 600 million more added every day. With a database so enormous, speed and performance are absolutely critical. Catalina laid out a three-headed challenge: provide equipment to run and test with, achieve savings in their support and development costs, and – the biggest challenge of all – achieve an eight-fold increase in performance. On top of that, Catalina sought high availability answers and a long-term solution.

“We typically push the envelope in terms of scalability and database volumes,” offers Mr. Carrigan in a bit of an understatement. “It doesn’t really matter how cheap the box is, or how fast it runs, if it isn’t up and running it’s no good to me.” Because Catalina operates its data warehouse on an Application Service Provider (ASP) basis to retailers, down-time is a financial liability the company can’t afford.

The Solution

Up against three other vendors – SUN, HP, and Compaq – Datatrend proposed a solution that included IBM eServer pSeries servers and workstations, a Storage Area Network (SAN), and a Linear Tape-Open (LTO) library. “When you look at our selection criteria – support, scalability, performance and reliability – the IBM solution proposed by Datatrend sorted out to the top on every count,” says Mr. Carrigan. “We are very pleased with the performance of the IBM servers; they are definitely operating to the performance guarantees.”

Catalina found an added bonus in cost savings. “The solution was attractively priced and will be cheaper to maintain,” notes Mr. Carrigan. Furthermore, owing to a rapid deployment the company will be realizing the financial benefits that much sooner. “We’ve been very pleased with Datatrend’s execution skills,” he continues, “and the key IBM relationships they brought to the table.”

Providing Added Value

A trustworthy solution provider must be able to add value beyond the solution, to set itself apart. Datatrend distinguished itself with its vast applications experience and a “go the extra mile" attention to customer service. Beyond providing a competitive deal, Datatrend put its chief solution architect on site at Catalina, who worked closely with Catalina’s IT staff to get the job done.

“My developers are my immediate client,” says Mr. Carrigan. “When they’re happy, I’m happy.” Which is a real way to measure value and success.

IBM is a registered trademark of International Business Machines Corporation. Unix is a registered trademark of Open Source. Checkout Coupon and Checkout Direct are registered trademarks of Catalina Marketing Corporation. All other company and/or product names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies.

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