SCIENCE

IBM has announced that CSN Stores, the third largest online retailer of home goods in the U.S., has selected IBM's Netezza TwinFin appliance to quickly mine and analyze terabytes of business data flowing through the company every day.

The new appliance will power CSN's business analytics platform to monitor trends related to profitability, customer satisfaction, customer retention, order fulfillment and supply chain. The company will use the data to drive organic growth initiatives and discover new ways to better serve their customers.

With a network of over 250 award-winning online retail stores including, AllModern.com, Luggage.com, Cookware.com, BedroomFurniture.com and Strollers.com, CSN sells over two million products – everything from toys, tools, and toasters to furniture, fitness gear, and flooring – offering unparalleled selection, service and savings to more than seven million visitors each month from the U.S., Canada, U.K., and Germany.

Because CSN Stores is on an aggressive growth plan, the company required a solution that provides scalability well into the future.  With the IBM Netezza appliance, CSN is able to go beyond the capabilities of its legacy data warehouse and answer questions in seconds or minutes that previously took hours or days.

"We evaluated a variety of vendors, but the IBM Netezza team exceeded our expectations during the evaluation process," said Steven Conine, CSN Stores' Chairman and Co-Founder. "They demonstrated the best price/performance, simplicity and formula for success making them the obvious choice."

In keeping with CSN's tradition of naming every computer in its network after an animal, the e-retailer named the TwinFin appliance, "Swift," after the fastest bird in the world.

"The name is very symbolic for us," said Ed Macri, Vice President of Advertising and Business Intelligence at CSN Stores. "We are a very data-driven company and need to make information available to the business faster to drive decision-making. We were experiencing performance issues with our legacy BI platform and were looking to speed up our ability to crunch through and analyze the vast amounts of new data we generate daily."

"CSN Stores' next-generation analytics platform allows for new opportunities to access, integrate and analyze business data," said Jim Kelly, IBM Netezza's General Manager of Retail. "The combination of refining vast amounts of data with sophisticated modeling provides a technical backbone for long-term growth that only IBM can provide."