IBM revealed the availability of its Netezza Customer Intelligence Appliance today. The appliance empowers retailers to analyze petabytes of data about customer interactions regarding their products across multiple segments and points of interaction. Retailers can use the Netezza Customer Intelligence Appliance to obtain a 360 degree picture of customer behavior spanning the internet, mobile and purchases in brick and mortar stores. Based on the premise that 70 percent of a customer’s initial interactions with a product take place online, IBM partnered with Aginity to develop actionable analytics that assist retailers to understand and predict customer behavior by aggregating data from multiple channels. Leslie Weber, CIO of Bass Pro Shops, testified that the appliance had enabled the retailer to analyze data from “retail stores, boat dealerships, Internet and catalog sales, wholesale and hospitality,” thereby enabling it to “deliver more targeted promotions, circulars and catalogs to create a better shopping experience.” The Netezza Customer Intelligence Appliance is a SQL based Big Data product designed to deliver analytics on structured data. IBM is still in the process of integrating Netezza with its BigInsights, Hadoop-based appliance for analyzing structured and unstructured data.
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