Hallmark Cards, the greetings card company, revealed late yesterday that it has expanded its data warehouse environment with Teradata products.
The company also said the new products would reduce its total cost of ownership in this area by 30 percent.
It has taken on new Teradata data warehouse appliances, marketing management software from its subsidiary Aprimo and backup and recovery utilities, as well as Teradata Viewpoint and Professional Services support.
With these new data management capabilities, DeAnna Blair, Hallmark Cards marketing project leader, said Hallmark is using its new systems to gain more value from data gathered daily from point-of-sale information, including purchases from millions of loyalty card holders.
"We operate in a complex, consumer-centric business, which requires a more agile data warehouse with excellent performance economics," she stated.
She added that Teradata had proven its worth in handling extreme analytic requirements in a mixed-query workload environment and that the company would now look to use this ability, in conjunction with the Aprimo Relationship Manager (ARM) application, to execute more complex marketing campaigns.
"We in the marketing team were ready to start doing more automated multi-step campaigns and the new Teradata-Aprimo software now provides us with that valuable capability," she said.
Teradata reported that Hallmark users are finding the latest ARM release is more intuitive with its new user interface and faster at processing jobs, while its new simulation feature enables more scenario analysis.
Hallmark is a long-term customer of the data warehouse vendor, having most recently consolidated two Teradata environments into its current single 18-node enterprise data warehouse to gain a single view of the data powering its customer marketing initiatives.
Teradata acquired Aprimo for its marketing platform technology in December 2010 in a $525 million (343.2 million) cash deal to capitalise on the analytical challenges involved in handling so-called "big data".
