HP offers marketers real-time big data insights with Digital Marketing Hub

HP has added to its burgeoning big data product portfolio, which aims to make it easier for marketers to make sense of customer information from multiple sources.

The HP Digital Marketing Hub features technology from several of the hardware giant's data and analytics units, including HP Vertica, HP Labs and HP Autonomy, while its web-based interface is powered by the firm's Converged Cloud offering.

From here, marketing types can track their customers' behaviour in real-time, such as how they negotiate their way through a website, and use this information to hone how they target offers and online content to them in the future.

The company claims the Digital Marketing Hub can track user data from multiple sources, including mobile channels, print, social networking sites and contact centre scenarios.

The product's launch is being overseen by the team at HP Autonomy, with the HP unit's vice president of marketing, Gabriele DiPiazza, telling IT Pro the product offers functionality few others in the big data market have right now.

"The objective of this solution is to help businesses increase engagement, conversions and revenue and we believe there is a need in the market right now to consolidate marketing data from across different sources and analyse it in real-time," he said.

Sunil Menon, chief technology officer and head of product management for marketing optimisation at HP Autonomy, said the offering should also streamline the resources needed to extract value from marketing data sets.

"When you think about the process marketers follow today and the sophistication required in terms of trying to address and understand customer behaviour, especially when you're dealing with data from differing marketing systems and different applications," Menon told IT Pro.

"The techniques they have to use today require the heavy involvement of data scientists, specialised skill sets and data aggregation can be a problem."

The offering has been trialled in both the UK and US over the last 18 months, and falls under the umbrella of HP's wider HAVEn big data strategy.

"The HP Digital Marketing Hub is the first marketing application for the HAVEn platform...[and] it sits almost at the intersection between big data and marketing," explained DiPiazza.

"There's more data generated from customer touch points than we even ever imagined, so marketing is certainly going to be one big growth area for big data. Absolutely it is."