CSN enhances shopping experience with IBM data warehouse tool

Armonk, N.Y. -- CSN Stores, the third largest online retailer of home goods in the United States, has selected IBM's Netezza TwinFin appliance to quickly mine and analyze terabytes of business data flowing through the company every day.



The new tool 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.



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, chairman and co-founder, CSN Stores, Boston. "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, VP 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."