INDUSTRY

Sun Microsystems today announced that Egg plc has achieved a dramatic reduction in the time it takes to roll out marketing campaigns following the implementation of its new customer data warehouse (CDW), reducing data latency from 42 days to one, which has resulted in incremental sales. Egg plc provides banking, insurance, investments and mortgages to more than 3 million customers through its Web site and other distribution channels and currently processes more than 2.5 million transactions per day. Aiming to create a single source of information about customers multiple touchpoints with Egg, the bank decided to bring its CDW in-house using a business intelligence data warehousing (BIDW) system from Sun which includes a Sun Fire 15K server running UltraSPARC IV processors, Oracle Database 9i and SAS systems. The CDW, which is currently two terabytes and growing, has scaled as the company has grown and enabled the expansion of its marketing, risk, and compliance capabilities. Working alongside Oracle and SAS, Sun implemented a BIDW solution based around its Sun Fire 15K servers and Solaris Operating System (OS) to give Egg better analysis of customer data, providing Egg with a single source of information on its customers and allowing it to do insight analysis to determine the propensity of a customer to buy additional products. This data enabled campaign managers, creative and phone sales teams to offer customers the right products at the right times and generate incremental sales. "We believe we've made an excellent choice in using Sun's, Oracle and SAS's technology to help manage and analyze our customer data. The implementation of our invaluable customer data warehouse has enabled us to deliver customer intelligence to the marketing, credit and finance departments which in turn has grown Egg's business further," says Jay Parmar, Head of Data, Customer Technology Team at Egg. "The data warehouse adds enormous benefit to our customers by providing information and data necessary to help them make informed decisions on their finances," added Parmar. "We are delighted that Sun's continued relationship with Egg is delivering such great results across the business. By working with Oracle and SAS we have been able to provide a scalable and reliable infrastructure which is able to handle the heavy analysis Egg requires. Nearly three-quarters of UK consumers now report that they would consider buying a financial product from Egg, demonstrating some of the results of this project," said Trudy Norris Grey, Vice President and Managing Director, Sun Microsystems UK.