Unlocking the Power of Marketing Data with 182x Faster Performance
Catalina Marketing is a global leader in personalized consumer packaged goods (CPG) marketing, using real-time data to understand shopper behavior and strengthen consumer relationships. The company operates in grocery stores, drugs chains, and mass retailers, delivering personalized coupons digitally and at checkout to drive engagement and sales.
Catalina initially relied on Netezza for its data infrastructure, but aging hardware and performance limitations led to inefficiencies. Long query times, instability, and rising infrastructure costs made it difficult to process and analyze large volumes of data. To keep up with its growing data needs, Catalina looked for a faster, more efficient solution.
The Search for a Better Solution
With vast amounts of data being stored and ingested at once, Catalina explored data warehouse alternatives that could handle growing data volumes, improve performance, and enhance operational efficiency. Catalina ran a PoC with Yellowbrick, which outperformed Netezza in both query speed and cost efficiency. Impressed by the results, Catalina transitioned to Yellowbrick’s SQL data platform.
Why Yellowbrick?
Catalina migrated to Yellowbrick consolidating workloads and eliminating inefficient Netezza servers. Yellowbrick became Catalina’s central data hub, managing 62 billion orders and 500 billion UPC-level purchases while providing high-performance analytics across regions. With seamless 24/7 operations, it supports continuous data ingestion and loads tens of thousands of stores daily, while leaving capacity for additional queries.
"Our Yellowbrick implementation involved a large-scale migration of existing data assets and analytics products. It is an outstanding high-performance data platform that is easy to implement and maintain. And it has proven itself to be an enterprise data warehouse platform with rich workload management, supporting hundreds of users across data analytics, data science and business intelligence."
Beyond infrastructure efficiency, Yellowbrick transformed business processes. Media operations teams no longer had to schedule work around system limitations. Queries that previously took hours now run in seconds or minutes, allowing teams to focus on strategy rather than system constraints. Additionally, the deployment of cloud-based Yellowbrick instances ensured disaster recovery capabilities without operational disruption.
Top Outcomes
- 182x faster query performance: What used to take hours on Netezza now executes in seconds or minutes.
- 8x faster query concurrency: Managing 62 billion orders and 500 billion UPC-level purchases while supporting hundreds of users running complex ad-hoc queries simultaneously.
- 96% data center footprint reduction: From 4 racks with Netezza to 6U with Yellowbrick.
- Cost Savings: Catalina saved hundreds of thousands in maintenance costs by eliminating legacy Netezza hardware, further optimizing IT spending.
- Increased user satisfaction: Teams now run queries anytime, without being restricted to off-peak hours, improving productivity throughout the day.
With faster performance, lower costs, solid reliability, and improved user efficiency, Catalina has transformed data from a bottleneck into a strategic asset.
With Yellowbrick, Catalina isn’t just managing data, it is turning insights into action faster than years ago.
