Business

Analytics
CASE STUDY - Nationwide
Financial Services Standardizes
on Netezza to Power its
Business Intelligence

AVISEK MONDAL
PRN :
12030241068
Division : B
Batch : 12-14

Introduction
Nationwide Financial Services, Inc. (NFS) provides financial services that help consumers
invest and protect their long-term assets, and also offers retirement plans and services through
public- and private-sector employers. It is part of the Nationwide group of companies,
offering diverse insurance and financial services, and led by Nationwide Mutual Insurance
Company, ranked No. 108 on the Fortune 500 based on 2007 revenue.
The company relies on sophisticated business intelligence software to analyze sales and
marketing data so it can continually refine its offerings and marketing strategies. With its
unique analytic appliance, Netezza provides NFS with a high performance data warehouse
platform that allows NFS to use business intelligence applications to full advantageto look
deeper, wider and certainly faster to deliver more targeted offerings than its competitors. The
financial services leader is using a Netezza system to standardize on industry-leading
WebFOCUS business intelligence software from Information Builders, Inc. Together,
Information Builders and Netezza provide a powerful BI foundation that gives Nationwide
users more meaningful access to their data. The WebFOCUS deployment provides NFS with
a single reporting tool that presents key information.
Netezza designs and markets high-performance data warehouse appliances and advanced
analytics applications for uses including enterprise data warehousing, business intelligence,
predictive analytics and business continuity planning.
Netezza is widely credited for either inventing or bringing renewed attention to the data
warehouse appliance category, depending upon whether one regards long-time data
warehouse technology vendor Teradata as having been in the data warehouse appliance
category all along.
WebFOCUS 8, the latest business intelligence (BI) platform from Information Builders,
makes this possible by allowing organizations to leverage their information assets more
efficiently and effectively across and beyond the organization, transforming how users
access, interact with, and consume information for their strategic, operational, and personal
needs.
With WebFOCUS 8, companies can accelerate the delivery of
comprehensive and intuitive BI solutions internally and
externally, and build rich, secure information systems and
applications that can be deployed internally, in the cloud, on
mobile devices, or as software-as-a-service (SaaS)
applications. Its unique combination of simplified
development, deep customization, robust analytic and
visualization capabilities, device and platform independence, powerful security, and
unmatched scalability make WebFOCUS 8 the only BI platform that can deliver analytical,
operational, and customer-facing BI.

Objective
Nationwide Financial Services, Inc. (NFS) provides financial services that help consumers
invest and protect their long-term assets, and also offers retirement plans and services through
public- and private-sector employers. NFS has an impressive growth record through its
ability to offer customized retirement products that give customers more choices and control

over their financial security. The company relies on sophisticated business intelligence
software to analyze sales and marketing data so it can continually refine its offerings and
marketing strategies. NFS requires a high performance data warehouse platform that would
allow NFS to use business intelligence applications to full advantageto look deeper, wider
and certainly faster to deliver more targeted offerings than its competitors. NFS requires a
single reporting BI tool that presents key information, such as yesterday's sales results, to fit
the needs of individual departments and users.

Assumption
Nationwides transition to WebFOCUS, with the NPS system as its processing engine,
reflects a relationship with Netezza that will plan to provide in strengthen and evolving the
company strategically. In 2007, NFS migrated its data warehouse operations onto the
Netezza, assuming it to support a variety of business intelligence and reporting applications
which will be used in across its sales and marketing organizations. The move was prompted
by performance issues with the incumbent data warehouse system. Slow response time was
preventing users from getting necessary information in time to be useful, and many complex
queries would not run at all. The incumbent vendor did what data warehouse vendors
typically do when its system is overmatched it turned to workarounds. In this case, a
summarization data mart was developed for reports and queries, creating a complex
environment that was difficult to maintain. In addition to poor performance and the limited
flexibility of this approach, the costs of constant hardware upgrades and intensive
administration were no longer tenable. As a result, Nationwide turned to the Netezza
appliance.

Observation
NFS realized a huge impact by implementing Netezza as the data warehouse platform for its
business intelligence applications. Now, more than 5,000 users have access to a real-time
view of all their data, which had been impossible earlier. Queries run 24 to 125 times faster
on Netezza, and queries that were formerly on the wish list became routine. For example,
two ad hoc SQL queries that could not even run in the incumbent environment can be
processed in 24 seconds and 64 seconds, respectively. This speed and flexibility for business
intelligence ultimately allows faster time-to-market for new financial products, enhancing
Nationwides ability to execute market strategies and connect with its customers.
As Nationwide has discovered, the users ability to get the intelligence that they need, when
they need it, can transform a business. Some of the new capabilities made possible by
Netezza bring the raw improvement numbers to life:

NFS can examine sales information on a daily basis, where previously it was only
available in monthly increments and without company-specific details.
The company can track all interactions between intermediaries and customers from
start to finish, which it couldnt do before.
Nationwide is able to create custom benchmarks and identify different perceptions of
risk in order to better accommodate customer needs a key differentiator for the
company.
The organization can now compensate its traders based on specific performance
figures rather than simply by seniority or managers intuition

Analysis
About Information Builders
As a leading independent business intelligence (BI) company for the past 30 years,
Information Builders has provided innovative solutions to more than 12,000 customers,
including most of the Fortune 100 and numerous U.S. federal government agencies. The
company's flagship WebFOCUS product is the world's most widely used BI platform.
Superior
architecture
and
intuitive
nature
enables
WebFOCUS to address the needs
of everyone in the extended
global enterprise - executive,
analytical,
operational,
and
beyond. It provides the agility to
adapt to changing business
conditions with the security,
scalability, and flexibility to
support dozens to millions of
users. Headquartered in New
York City with 90 offices
worldwide,
the
company
employs 1,150 people and has more than 100 business partners.
About Netezza
Netezza (NYSE Arca: NZ) is the global leader in data warehouse
and analytic appliances that dramatically simplify highperformance analytics for business users across the extended
enterprise, delivering significant competitive and operational
advantage in todays information-intensive marketplaces. The
Netezza Performance Server (NPS) family of streaming analytic
appliances brings appliance simplicity to a broad range of complex
data warehouse and analytic challenges. Customers who are
realizing the benefits of Netezza appliances include Ahold,
Amazon.com, CNET Networks, Debenhams, Department of
Veterans Affairs, Epsilon, Neiman Marcus, Orange UK, Premier,
Inc., Ross Stores, Ryder System, Inc., The Carphone Warehouse
and Virgin Media. Based in Marlborough, Mass., Netezza has
offices in Washington, DC, the United Kingdom and Asia Pacific.

Implementation
Data loads much more rapidly on the NPS system than on its predecessor. Nationwide was
able to load all of its tables onto the Netezza platform in only 54 minutes, with uncompressed
data processed at an extremely fast 165 GB per hour. At this speed, reports can run in near
real-time, analyzing fresh data no more than 30 minutes old. A sharp reduction in total cost of
ownership (TCO) is another advantage. Users get the performance and flexibility they never

had on their previous data warehouse system, and with Netezzas appliance simplicity theres
no time-consuming tuning

Conclusion
NFS chose the Netezzas NPS system as its
analytic platform when it came time to
consolidate business intelligence operations.
WebFOCUS will provide Nationwide with a
single operational reporting tool across the
organization and that can scale to support 1,000
business users, operations managers and
wholesalers. In the future, it will also be
customer-facing, making it easier for
Nationwide to be more responsive to
customers'
needs.
The
unprecedented
processing power and operational simplicity of
Netezza brings business users the information they need without traditional data warehouse
limitations.
"Improving informational data management, with tools like the NPS system, will help expand
our business intelligence capabilities, observes Tim Lyons, vice president, Business Solution
Services at Nationwide Financial. As we elevate the impact of marketing and sales processes
going forward, BI capabilities will become an essential and increasingly important area of
investment. We fully expect this technology to result in better performance, enhanced
flexibility and increased cost savings across the organization."

Recommendation
Netezza are a good choice for companies having a variety of platforms, databases and
application packages.
WebFOCUS is the reporting engine that turns corporate data into meaningful information,
complemented with Web components for presenting information and interacting with end
users.
It is armed with a set of tools to extend its capabilities and facilitate ease of use, but we will
concentrate on the core WebFOCUS technologies. From the programmer point of view, there
are two main parts of each WebFOCUS system to develop:

Web interface this is done using standard and typical Web technologies (any of them
can be used: DHTML, J2EE, PHP, ASP, etc.)

Report logic - The report logic can be divided further into two parts:
o Data access logic (data integration), which describes underlying data
structures and the physical location of data sources. It is determined by the
data adapter's configuration, and the metadata layer, which consists of the set

of defined synonyms. Data adapters are usually configured during the

WebFOCUS server installation. Synonyms can be created using a reporting
server Web console, data management console, or your favorite text editor.
Data processing and formatting logic this is done using FOCUS 4GL.
FOCUS 4GL is the set of several data processing languages named requests,
but they could be called the dialects as well. Each one of the dialects can be
considered separately, as the language for the autonomous data processing
engine, but (if needed) the different FOCUS dialects can be seamlessly
combined into one processing procedure.

Limitation
Some limitations of Netezza:

An application can only execute one cursor (or statement handle) at a time.
Singular data modification statements (INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE) are much
slower than with traditional OLTP database servers. Netezza is, however, very good
when it comes to loading a huge amount of data with special tools like the nzload
utility.
SELECT ... FOR UPDATE is not supported. Regular SELECTs never lock rows.
Locks can only be set for an entire table with LOCK TABLE.
A maximum of 31 concurrent INSERT processes are allowed (Netezza V6), and there
must be only INSERTs in a transaction block.
UPDATE/DELETE statements lock the entire table, but don't prevent SELECTs.
Other processes doing UPDATEs/DELETEs will wait until the first session has
committed.
Netezza (V6) understands the SET TRANSACTION ISOLATION statement, but
currently implements only the SERIALIZABLE level.
There is no way to define the LOCK WAIT mode. With Netezza, processes always
wait for locks to be released.

Some limitations of WebFOCUS

Higher versions of Java may cause certain WebFOCUS features to fail. Due to the complex
internal processing of ReportCaster, there are limitations for using WebFOCUS features. The
following features are not supported in scheduled procedures:

PCSEND - WebFOCUS reporting feature to store report sections in different files.

Multiple TABLE or GRAPH requests with HTML format - Internally, these are
multiple HTML documents. Only the result of the first TABLE or GRAPH request
(without a HOLD or SAVE command) is distributed. To distribute a graph, you must
use the GIF, JPG, PNG, or SVG format.

MORE - This command is used to concatenate data sources.

Following WebFOCUS features are not available with ReportCaster because they require
distribution of multiple files, or integration with Web or Application server components:

OLAP - Only entire reports or burst report sections are distributed. OLAP capability
requires authentication and connection to the WebFOCUS components on the
Web/Application server.

Graph Drill Down - When a GRAPH request is run, ReportCaster creates the graph
as an image. When GRAPH requests are run through the WebFOCUS Client, there is
an HTML form and the graph image. The HTML form has a reference to display the
graph image and any corresponding drill downs.

Drill Down from Report Library - You cannot drill down to Managed Reporting
procedures from reports stored in the Report Library. To drill down to WF Server
reports, you must specify the SET FOCEXURL command in the scheduled procedure
so that the location of the WebFOCUS Client is known and the drill down can be
executed.

Bibliography

case study Nationwide Financial Services Standardizes on Netezza to Power its Business
Intelligence
www.informationbuilders.com/solutions/pdf/Nationwide_Netezza.pdf

Information about Netezza

www.netezza.com
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netezza
http://pic.dhe.ibm.com/infocenter/idshelp/v117/index.jsp?topic=
%2Fcom.ibm.gen_busug.doc%2Fc_fgl_odiagntz_011.htm

Information about WebFocus

http://www.passionned.com/business-intelligence/business-intelligence-tools/list-ofbusiness-intelligence-bi-tools/webfocus-business-intelligence/