ACADEMIA

EXASOL AG have won German social media pioneer StayFriends as a new customer. Their data warehouse management solution, EXASolution, primarily optimizes StayFriends’ heritage business intelligence (BI) solution. This enables real-time data analysis and evaluation, allowing for a more precise categorization of visitors to the portal. By opting for the high performance database from EXASOL, StayFriends secure their long-term decision-making basis for further extending their product portfolio and for better tailoring their services the their target groups.

StayFriends was founded in 2002. With offices in Berlin and Erlangen, it is a leading provider of online communities for friends and former classmates in Europe. The company operates social networking platforms with more than 25 million members in Germany, Austria, France and Sweden.

The company’s rapid growth, the associated growth in data volume and the increasing requirements on the BI solutions made the heritage MySQL solution reach its limits. The people in charge of BI at StayFriends therefore were looking for a new database solution with significantly higher performance while keeping the administration effort low. After a detailed selection process and tests at the in-house data center, they opted for EXASolution.

The high performance database EXASolution 4.0 has been in productive use at StayFriends since early January, 2012, as an analysis system. The generic JDBC loading interface of the EXAloader that is used to load all data from the MySQL database into EXASolution, allows for a seamless integration into the existing infrastructure. For the analysis and the reporting of the evaluation data, an in-house BI front end is used. In addition, StayFriends use the statistics and analysis software by SPSS for data mining purposes which simply connects to EXASolution via standard ODBC drivers.

The users at the StayFriends specialist departments benefit from the new self-service complete solution as they are now able to generate their own ad-hoc statistics on demand.

„With EXASolution, StayFriends can now access their data securely, flexibly, at any time, and run efficient analyses for customer segmentation in order to gain a significant competitive edge“, says Steffen Weissbarth, CEO of EXASOL AG. „Along with the good value for money and the low administration effort, StayFriends also appreciated our high-performance database.“

„We were clearly focused on having a clear separation between the portal database and the analytic database to make sure running analyses will not impact our day-to-day operations“, says Martin Funke, Senior Manager BI at StayFriends. „The decision pro EXASOL will contribute to StayFriends‘ business success“, Funke continues. “In the future, the findings gained from the analysis will be carried back into the portal in order to generate more added value for the community’s users.”