Unum Group Architect Charts a DevOps Course to a Hybrid Cloud Future

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how Unum Group has benefited from a better process around application development and deployment using HP tools.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: HP.

Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to the next edition of the HP Discover Performance Podcast Series. I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your moderator for this ongoing discussion of IT innovation and how it’s making an impact on people’s lives.

Gardner

Once again, we're focusing on how IT leaders are improving their services' performance to deliver better experiences and payoffs for businesses and end users alike, and this time we're coming to you directly from the recent HP Discover 2013 Conference in Las Vegas.

Our next innovation case study interview highlights how employee benefits provider Unum Group has been building a DevOps continuum and is exploring the benefits of a better process around applications development and deployment. And we are going to learn more about how they've been using certain tools and approaches to improve their applications delivery.

So join me in thanking our guests for being here. We're joined by Tim Durgan, an Enterprise Application Architect at Unum Group. Welcome, Tim.

Tim Durgan: Thank you, Dana.

Gardner: We're also here with Petri Maanonen, Senior Product Marketing Manager for Application Performance Management at HP Software. Welcome, Petri. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Petri Maanonen: Hello, Dana.

Gardner: Let's talk a little bit about what's important for your company. You're a large insurer. You're in the Fortune 500. You're one of the largest employee benefits providers in the U.S. and you have a big presence in the UK as well. What are some of the imperatives that have driven you to try to improve upon your applications delivery?

Durgan: Even though, as you said, we're one of the largest employee benefits providers in the United States, we began to realize that there were smaller companies starting to chip away in segments of the market.

Durgan

It became imperative to deliver products more rapidly to the market, because delivery was a multi-year effort, which was unacceptable. If it took that long from concept to delivery, there would be a completely new market dynamic at play.

We started to look at application architectures like service-oriented architecture (SOA) to deliver agility, process automation, and rules automation -- all very mainstream approaches. We discovered pretty quickly that to use those approaches effectively you needed to have a level of governance.

Governance initiative

We had an SOA governance initiative that I led and we brought in technology from HP to aid us with that. It was the Business Service Management (BSM) suite of tools, the Systinet Repository, and some partner products from HP.

What we discovered very quickly is that in enterprise architecture, where I am from in the company, bringing in an operational tool like monitoring was not hailed as, "Thanks for helping us." There was this organizational push back. It became very clear to me early on that we were operating in silos. Delivery was doing their efforts, and we would throw it over the wall to QA. QA would do their job, and then we would ultimately move it out to a production environment and operational aspects would take over.

It really dawned on me early on that we had to try to challenge the status quo around the organization. That's what started to get me focused on this DevOps idea, and HP has a number of products that are really allowing that philosophy to become a reality.

Gardner: Tell me what you think that philosophy is. Does it differ from perspective and position within organizations as an enterprise architect, sort of a über role over some of these groups? How do you define DevOps?

Durgan: I have a couple of principles that I use when I talk about DevOps, and I try to use titles for these principles that are a little disruptive, so people pay attention.

For instance, I'll say "eliminate the monkeys," which essentially means you need to try to automate as much as possible. In many companies, their development process is filled with committees of people making decisions on criteria that are objective. Machines are very good at objective criteria. Let's save the humans for subjective things.

We want to put a product out quickly, but if it's going to fail, we would love to know it's going to fail very quickly, not make millions of dollars in investments.

That's what I talk about when we say eliminate the monkeys, get people out of the middle. It's really interesting, because as an architect, I recognize the automation of business process. But somehow I missed the fact that we need to automate the IT process, which in a lot of ways, is what DevOps is about.

Another principle is "fail fast." If you're going to deliver software fast, you need to be able to fail fast. As an example that I presented here at the conference last year -- which I knew most of the HP people loved -- was Palm. I'm sure they wished they had failed faster, because that was a pretty painful lesson, and a lot of companies struggle with that.

Unum does. We want to put a product out quickly, but if it's going to fail, we would love to know it's going to fail very quickly, not make millions of dollars in investments.

Another one is visibility throughout. I will say monitoring is a team sport. In a lot of companies, there are 50 or 60 monitoring tools. Each team has a monitoring tool. You have to have a secret decoder ring to use each monitoring tool.

While diversity is normally a great thing, it isn't when it comes to monitoring. You can't have the ops guy looking at data that's different from what the developer is looking at. That means you're completely hopeless when it comes to resolving issues.

Working collaboratively

My last one is "Kumbaya." A lot of IT organizations act competitively. Somehow infrastructure believes they can be successful without development and without QA and vice versa. Business sees only IT. We are a complete team and we have to work collaboratively to achieve things.

So those are really the ways I think about DevOps at the company.

Gardner: Petri, when you hear words like "process automation for IT" and a common view of the data across IT groups, it must be music to your ears?

Maanonen: Oh, sure. And the team has been very accurately capturing the essence of how DevOps needs to be supported as a function and of course shared among different kinds of teams in silos.

Maanonen

If you look at HP, we've been supporting these various teams for 15 years, whether it has been testing a performance of an application or monitoring from the end-user perspective and so forth. So we've been observing from our customers -- and Unum is a brilliant example of that -- them growing and developing their kind of internal collaboration to support these DevOps processes. Obviously the technology is a good supporting factor in that.

Tim was mentioning the continuous delivery type of demands from the business. We have been trying to step up, not only by developing the technology, but actually bringing very quickly supportive software-as-a-service (SaaS) types of offerings, Agile Manager and Performance Anywhere for example. Then, customers can quickly adopt the supporting technology and get this collaboration and a DevOps cycle, the continuous improvement cycle, going.

Gardner: Now, of course, this isn't just a technology discussion. When you said Kumbaya, obviously this is about getting people to see the vision, buy into the vision, and then act on the vision. So tell me a little bit more, Tim, about the politics of DevOps.

We are a complete team and we have to work collaboratively to achieve things.

Durgan: So you are going to ask me politics for this public interview. At Unum there is none, first of all, but I hear there is at other companies. I think the problem that a lot of companies have, and Unum as well, is that unfortunately we all have individual expectations and performance. We all have a performance review at the end of the year and we have things that we need to do. So it is, as you mentioned, getting everybody to buy into that holistic vision, and having these groups all sign up for the DevOps vision.

We've had good success in the conversation so far at Unum. I know we've talked to our Chief Technology Officer, and he's very supportive of this. But because we're still on the journey, we want data, metrics, and some evidence to support the philosophy. I think we're making some progress in the political space, but it's still a challenge.

I'm part of the HP BSM CAB (Customer Advisory Board), and in that group is, they talk about these other different small monitoring products trying to chip away at HP's market. The product managers, will ask, "Why is that? And I say that part of the problem is BSM is pitching enterprise monitoring.

The assumption is that a lot of organizations sign on to the enterprise monitoring vision. A lot of them don't, because the infrastructure team cares about the server, the application team cares about the app, and the networking team cares about the network. In a lot of ways, that's the same challenge you have in DevOps.

Requests for visibility

But I hear a lot of requests from the infrastructure and application teams for that visibility into each other's jobs, into their spaces, and that's what DevOps is pitching. DevOps is saying, "We want to give you visibility, engineer, so that you can understand what this application needs, and we want to give you visibility, developer, into what's happening in the server environment so you can partner better there."

There is a good grassroots movement on this in a lot of ways, more than a top-down. If you talk about politics, I think in a lot of cases it has to be this “Occupy IT” movement.

Gardner: What are some of the paybacks that are tangible and identifiable when DevOps is done properly, when that data is shared and there is a common view, and the automation processes gets underway?

Maanonen: What we hear from our customers, and obviously Unum is no exception to that, is that they're able to measure the return on investment (ROI) from the number of downtime hours or increased productivity or revenue, just avoiding the old application hiccups that might have been happening without this collaborative approach.

Also, there's the reduction of the mean time to resolve the issues, which they see in production and, with more supportive data than before, provide the fix through their development and testing cycles. That's happening much faster than in the past.

There is a good grassroots movement on this in a lot of ways, more than a top-down.

Where it might have been taking days or weeks to get some bugs in the application fixed, this might be happening in hours now because of this collaborative process.

Gardner: Tim, what about some of the initiatives that you're bound to be facing in the future, perhaps more mobile apps, smaller apps, the whole mobile-first mentality, and then more cloud options for you to deploy your apps differently, depending on what the economics and the performance and other requirements dictate. Does DevOps put you in a better position vis-à-vis what we all seem to see coming down the pike?

Durgan: It is, if you think about movement to the cloud, which Unum is very much looking at now. We're evaluating a cloud-first strategy. My accountability is writing this strategy.

And you start to think about, "I'm going to take this application and run it on a data center I don’t own anymore. So the need for visibility, transparency, and collaboration is even greater."

It’s a philosophy that enables all of the new emerging needs, whether it’s mobile, cloud, APIs, edge of the enterprise, all those types of phenomena. One of the other major things  we didn’t touch on it earlier that I would contend is a hurdle for organizations is, if you think about DevOps and that visibility, data is great, but if you don’t have any idea of expectations, it’s just data.

What about service-level management (SLM) and ITIL process, processes that predated ITIL, just this idea of what are the expectations, performance, availability, what have you for any aspect of the IT infrastructure or applications? If you don’t have a mature process there, it’s really hard for you to make any tangible progress in a DevOps space, an ALM space, or any of those things. That’s an organizational obstacle as well.

Make it real

One of the things we're doing at Unum is we're trying to establish SLAs beginning in dev, and that’s where we take fail fast to make it real. When I come to the conference and presented it, I had a lot of people look surprised. So I think it's radical.

If I can’t meet that SLA in dev, there's no way I am going to magically meet it in production without some kind of change. And so that’s a great enhancement. At first people say, that’s an awful lot of burden, but I try to say, "Look, I'm giving you, developer, an opportunity to fail and resolve your problem Monday through Friday, versus it goes to production, you fail, and you're here on the weekends, working around the clock."

That, to me is just one of those very simple things that is at the heart of a DevOps philosophy, a fail fast philosophy, and a big part of that development cycle. A lot of the DevOps tooling space right now is focused on some ALM on the front end, HP Agile Manager, and deployment.

Well, those are great, but as an application architect, I care about design and development. I think HP is well-positioned to do some great things with BSM, which has all that SLA data, and integrate that with things like the Repository, which has great lifecycle management. You start having these enforcement points and you say, "This code isn't moving unless it meets an SLA." That decision is made by the tool, objective criteria, decided by the system. There's no need to have a human involved. It's a great opportunity for HP to really do some cutting-edge and market-leading stuff.

Cloud and mobile are coming into play and are increasing the velocity of the applications and services being provisioned out to the end users.

Maanonen: We see that the cloud and mobile, as you mentioned, Dana, are coming into play and are increasing the velocity of the applications and services being provisioned out to the end users. We see that this bigger and larger focus, looking from the end user perspective of receiving the service, whether it’s a mobile or a cloud service, is something that we've been doing through our technology as a unifying factor.

It's very important when you want to break the silos. If the teams are adopting this end-user perspective, focusing on the end user experience improvement in each step of the development, testing, and monitoring, this is actually giving a common language for the teams and enhancing the chances of improved collaboration in the organization.

Durgan: That's a really good point. You start to hear this phrase now, the borderless enterprise, and it’s so true. Whether it’s mobile, cloud, or providing APIs to your customers, brokers, or third parties, that's the world we now live in. So we need to increase that quality and that speed to market. It’s no longer nice to have; You've got to deliver on that stuff.

If you don’t adopt DevOps principles and do some of these things around failing fast and providing holistic visibility and shared data, I just don't see how you change the game, how you move from your quarterly release cycle to a monthly, weekly, or daily release cycle. I don’t see how you do it.

Gardner: Here at HP Discover, we're hearing a lot about HAVEn, a platform that’s inclusive of many data and information types, with scale and speed and provisioning.

We're also hearing about Converged Cloud, an opportunity to play that hybrid continuum in the best way for your organization. And we heard some interesting things about HP Anywhere, going mobile, and enabling those endpoints at an agnostic level.

But after all, it’s still about the applications. If you don't have good apps -- and have a good process and methodology for delivering those apps -- all those other benefits perhaps don't pay back in the way they should.

Strong presence

So what’s interesting to me is that HP may be unique in that it has a very strong presence in the applications test, dev, deployment, fostering Agile, and fostering DevOps that the other competitors that are presenting options for mobile or for cloud don't have. So that’s a roundabout way of saying how essential it is to make people like Tim happy to the future of HP?

Maanonen: Tim has been pointing out that they're coming from a traditional IT environment and they're moving to the cloud now very fast. So you can see the breadth of the HP portfolio. Whatever technology area you're looking at, we should be pretty well-equipped to support companies and customers like Unum and others in different phases of their journey and the maturity curve when they move into cloud, mobile, and so forth. We're very keen to leverage and share those experiences we have here over the years with different customers.

Yesterday, there were customer roundtable events and customer advisory boards, where we're trying to make the customers share their experiences and best practices on what they've learned here. Hopefully, this podcast is giving an avenue to the other customers to hear what they should explore next.

But the portfolio breadth is one of the strengths for HP, and we're trying to stay competitive in each area. So I am happy that you have been observing that in the conference.

The portfolio breadth is one of the strengths for HP, and we're trying to stay competitive in each area.

Gardner: Last word to you, Tim. What would you like to see differently -- not necessarily just from a product perspective, but in terms of helping you cross the chasm from a siloed development organization and a siloed data center and production organization? What do you need to be able to improve on this DevOps challenge?

Durgan: The biggest thing HP can do for us is to continue to invest in those integrations of that portfolio, because you're right, they absolutely have great breadth of the offerings.

But I think the challenge for HP, with a company the size they are, is that they can have their own silos. You can talk to the Systinet team and talk to the BSM team and say, "Am I talking to the same company still?" So I think making that integration turnkey, like the integrations we're trying to achieve, is using their SOA Repository, their Systinet product as the heart of an SOA governance project.

We're integrating with Quality Center to have defects visible in the repository, so we can make an automated decision that this code moves because it has a reasonable number of defects. Zero is what we'd like to say, but let's be honest here, sometimes you have to let one go, if it’s minor. Very minor for any Unum people reading this.

Then, we are integrating with BSM, because we want that SLA data and that SLM data, and we are integrating with some of their partner products.

There’s great opportunity there. If that integration can be a smoother thing, an easier thing, a turnkey type operation, that makes the portfolio, that breadth something that you can actually use to get significant traction in the DevOps space.

Gardner: Well, great. I'm afraid we will have to leave it there. We've been learning about how Unum Group has been working toward a DevOps benefit and how they've been using HP products to do so.

So join me in thanking our guests, Tim Durgan, Enterprise Application Architect at Unum Group. Thank you, Tim.

Durgan: Thank you, Dana.

Gardner: And also Petri Maanonen, Senior Product Marketing Manager for Application Performance Management at HP Software. Thank you, Petri.

Maanonen: Thank you, Dana.

Gardner: And I'd like to thank our audience as well for joining us for this special HP Discover Performance Podcast coming to you from the recent HP Discover 2013 Conference in Las Vegas.

I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host for this ongoing series of HP sponsored discussions. Thanks again for joining, and come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: HP.

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how Unum Group has benefitted from a better process around application development and deployment using HP tools. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2013. All rights reserved.

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Deeper Intelligence Shared More Widely via HP Vertica Harvests Gems for Guess Retail Strategy

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how retailer Guess, Inc. has helped democratize data and speed up business decisions with HP Vertica.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: HP.

Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to the next edition of the HP Discover Performance Podcast Series. I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your moderator for this ongoing discussion of IT innovation and how it’s making an impact on people’s lives.

Gardner

Once again, we're focusing on how IT leaders are improving their services' performance to deliver better experiences and payoffs for businesses and end users alike, and this time we're coming to you directly from the HP Discover 2013 Conference in Las Vegas.

Our next innovation case study interview highlights how retailer Guess, Inc. has used HP Vertica to both speed up and better distribute its big-data analytics capabilities.

We'll see how Guess can increasingly predict how to satisfy its shopping customers, and we'll specifically look at how Guess's IT organization came to grips with adopting and implementing a big-data platform to bring more of a democratization of data and better access to its employees.

To learn more about how Guess has slashed the latency between data gathering and actionable insights, please join me now in welcoming our guest, Bruce Yen, Director of Business Intelligence at Guess, Inc. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Bruce Yen: Dana, thanks for having me here. It's a pleasure to be here and be able to share what we’ve done with HP Vertica.

Gardner: Tell me why just plain, old relational databases and legacy IT weren’t doing the job for you.

Yen: About three years ago we began searching for a new database platform. We were hitting a lot of performance bottlenecks on our data loads and performance. We also saw the competitive landscape out there with lot of our competitors embracing alternative solutions to their traditional database platforms.

Gardner: What sort of requirements did you have to get to where you wanted to be?

Yen: The first thing was performance. We needed to improve the query performance. A lot of our users were asking us to do a lot of queries with very low-level detail inventory, and it was very costly from a performance standpoint to be able to serve those queries up. Some queries wouldn't even come back.

Secondly, from a performance standpoint, we wanted to make sure that a lot of our East Coast stores would be able to receive the reports early in the morning, and we were having problems just serving those up on a daily basis on time.

New solution

The last part was to support any kind of innovative analytics, any kind of cutting-edge analytics. We knew that that platform really wasn't going to help us do any of that. So we needed to find a new solution.

Gardner: Before we go any further into what that solution did for you, let's learn more about Guess. We know one of your popular and well-known products is your jeans, Guess Jeans, but there is more to it than that. Tell us a bit about the organization.

Yen

Yen: Guess has been around for more than 30 years now and we've grown from primarily a U.S. retailer into more of an international retailer.

If you look at the '80s, lot of people from the States remember us for the triangle on the jeans. We were primarily a wholesaler in the beginning. Now, we have over 1,600 stores worldwide, and about half of those are run by licensees. We sell a wide variety of lifestyle products, targeting primarily younger women in their late teens to early 30s.

Gardner: So it's critical to understand that market, and this is a dynamic market. People's tastes change and tastes are also, of course, different from area to area around the world. What have you gotten as a result of Vertica? Can you give me some of the key performance indicators that now demonstrate what you can do when you've got the right platform and the right data.

Yen: I like to look at it this way. First of all, it's foundational, the foundations for just baseline performance. Have we met those goals? With Vertica we have. We've been able to meet all of our service-level agreements (SLAs) and serve up the reports on time. Not only that, but now we're able to serve up the queries that we weren't able to do at all.

We've been able to meet our daily needs, but we've been able to set ourselves up to be competitive in this area.

When you move aside from the foundational, the next steps are analytics, being able to apply analytics and go through our data to figure out how we can apply best practices to see how we can gain a competitive advantage. We've been able to take our transactional data and look at ways of taking the stored data and applying that into our e-commerce site to get better product recommendations for our e-com customers. That’s something that we couldn't have done with our existing system.

We have our customer relationship management (CRM) system. We have our loyalty segmentation for which we use Vertica to do all of the analytics and we feed that data back into our CRM system. With the data volume that we have, we could not have done that with our old system.

So it's opened up new doors, but not only from a foundational standpoint. We've been able to meet our daily needs, but we've been able to set ourselves up to be competitive in this area.

Gardner: And has being able to gain the speed and handle the complexity prompted you to then seek out additional data to put into your analytics, so in a sense of not feeling limited as to where you can go and what information you could bring to bear?

Different data

Yen: Definitely. We've been looking at different things lately. We've been looking at different types of data -- loyalty data and customer data -- that we get from our customers.

In being able to give our users a holistic 360-degree view of what's happening from that customer standpoint, Vertica has been very critical in keep pace and enabling us to do that.

Gardner: Of course, it's important to get more data, manage it, and perform what you need to do with it. It's also important to deliver it in a way that people can use and to get to what we mentioned earlier about that democratization. Tell me how you've been able to deliver this out to more people and in an interface and device fashion that they really want.

Yen: That’s a great point. Everyone talks about big data these days, but big data, if you can't serve it up to people, if they can't use it, and if there's not a pervasive use of the data, is really useless.

We're pretty innovative in what we do from a mobile standpoint. For the last two years we've had an iPad app that's powered by the Vertica back end. We have this iPad app that over a 100 merchants in North America and Europe use.

The exciting thing is being able to see our users look at the data and make the decisions.

It's been able to take a lot of the data, a lot of the stores’ data, a lot of the selling information. It's allowed them to travel to the stores, be in meetings, or at home on the weekends, and they can look at the best-seller information. They can look at the sales and do it in a way that is actually fun.

It's not just a bunch of dashboards or reports that you open up and look at, but we've made it very interactive and we’ve created workflows in there. So that really draws the user into wanting to use that information and wanting to ask different questions.

Gardner: And for this combination of the power of the platform, the quality of the data, and this distribution capability, can you give us some metrics of business success? Where this has helped you. Do you have any concrete things you can point at and say it's really working and here is how?

Yen: We’ve looked at that in different ways. One of the initial points that we're analyzing in terms of return on investment (ROI), the easiest one is the amount of paper that’s being saved. You can count up the reams, how much they cost, and multiply that, and there is some significant saving there.

But that doesn’t really excite anyone. It's great that we've been able to save paper, but the argument is, well, you also had to buy new equipment. These iPads aren’t free and the mobile device management software and everything else that's associated to it is a new ecosystem. So there is a lot of new cost there.

The exciting thing is being able to see our users look at the data and make the decisions. Before, they would have to stop at a meeting and go back to their desks. That decision that takes an instant now used to drag on for two or three days, maybe even a week, and I've seen that in action.

It's done a good job

I can't give you an actual dollar figure, but I've seen them make decisions to change the allocation of certain items as they are looking at that information. As I was training some of our executives or power users, I would see them pick up the phone and actually make decisions to impact the business. So I know that it definitely has done a good job there.

The exciting thing is it's kind of democratized this information and this data and demystified it to a point where everyone can access it and everyone wants to access it. I’ve never seen users get so excited about a platform or an app. We've got emails saying, "Can I please have this app. I saw one of my coworkers using it. Could I please?" Before, we were never asked that way.

It was always, "Can I get a copy of that report. No big deal if I get it now or later." But here, people really, really want to use it, and we could tell that we hit something.

Gardner: It's always good when you're in IT and you're perceived as a hero and not something else. Let's talk about the IT experience. Earlier on, you had to go on relational databases and traditional legacy approaches to data. You went to a new platform. What was it like to install? Did this create some skills gap? How was this received, and how did you react in terms of your IT people?

The one thing that I'm proud of is that our team was able to conquer all of these hurdles, and also we had a great partner in Vertica.

Yen: Initially, we had to deal with just our internal IT folks being very skeptical. A lot of the claims, "30 to 300 to 400 times faster in performance," "you’re only going to need a quarter of a DBA," were the first two items where a lot of us were a little skeptical, myself included, but the performance has really proved itself.

Aside from that, we have to look at it more realistically. How do we implement a system like this? A lot of it has to do with changing the data loads, and that, in and of itself, takes a lot of time. That's one of the things that's always going to take a lot longer than we thought, and it would be a lot more challenging than we had initially anticipated.

The one thing that I'm proud of is that our team was able to conquer all of these hurdles, and also we had a great partner in Vertica. They were there with us in the trenches, even though we were the first retailer and we had a different use case than all of the other previous clients and customers that they had.

We took a chance with them, they took a chance with us, and it worked out. We were able to prove that their software works on a multitude of different use cases. As a retailer, we have a lot of updates with our data. This was three years ago. Their clients then, lot of the telcos and banks were just loading data, not really doing a lot of updates with it. They were doing a lot of queries with it and it was coming back fast, but not really transforming the data all that much. So we had a lot more use cases like that and they were able to come through for us.

Gardner: What about the future? Do you have a sense of taking this powerful capability and pointing it in new directions, perhaps into supply chain, the ecosystem of partners, perhaps even into internal operations? What's the next step?

Exciting times

Yen: It's actually exciting times, because Vertica has proved itself so well. It's also very cost-effective. One of the projects that we're working on right now is that we have a relational database for our MRP system. It's more of an ODS reporting system. We’re actively converting the ODS system, which is actually a replicated database of the relational database, into a Vertica database. We're able to kind of replicate, mimic the native database replication scheme on the relational side, and use Vertica for it.

It's a use case that we were a little skeptical about in the beginning. Could this be done in Vertica? We thought, the payoff would be great if we could do this on Vertica, the speed for performance, the storage footprint, would be amazing. So far, it's turned out very well for us. We’re still in the middle of it, but all things point to success there.

Gardner: Well great. I am afraid we’ll have to leave it there. We’ve been learning about how Guess Inc. has been using HP Vertica to both speed up and better distribute its big-data analytics capabilities.

And we’ve seen how Guess’s IT organization came to grips with adopting and implementing a big data platform to slash the latency between data gathering and actionable insights. So a big thank you to our guest, Bruce Yen, Director of Business Intelligence at Guess. Thanks a lot.

Yen: Thank you, Dana.

Gardner: And thanks also to our audience for joining us for this special HP Discover Performance Podcast coming to you from the HP Discover 2013 Conference in Las Vegas.

I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host for this ongoing series of HP sponsored discussions. Thanks again for joining, and come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: HP.

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how retailer Guess, Inc. has helped democratize data and speed up business decisions with HP Vertica. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2013. All rights reserved.

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