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MARKETS » NFV Pandemic Tech News
October 20, 2008
Imaginative Data Warehousing Helps Boost eBayBy Brendan B. Read, Senior Contributing Editor An imaginative use of data warehousing over the past two years is enabling eBay (News - Alert) to cut costs and bring to realization improvements to its products, services and web sites far sooner than in the past.
Oliver Ratzesberger, eBay Senior Director, Architecture and Operations revealed at the Teradata (News - Alert) PARTNERS conference last week that as a result, his firm has cut server costs by up to $80 million a year and chopped application lead time to less than a year from three or more years. Many new eBay features have come about from this process: from the look of its web site to enhanced customer personalization.
eBay configured its two Teradata warehouses: a primary 2.5 petabyte (PB) unit in Phoenix, Ariz. and a secondary 2.2 PB box in Sacramento, Calif. into what is called “analytics as a service”.
The setup permits eBay’s business users, which amount to some 5,000 individuals, to develop, prototype, and test programs at a less expense and with greater speed compared to using data marts, which are smaller data repositories. However, eBay still requires access to the data warehouses. Through the use of analytics as a service, eBay’s teams developed and tested applications that found server misconfigurations and underused resources that the firm then changed to increase efficiency.
The prototyping has minimal impact on eBay’s data processing capabilities as they use a fraction of the resources: less than 500 gigabytes (GB) and typically fewer than 100 GBs per application.
“The key issue with data marts for us is that while they are less expensive than other data solutions they actually consume more resources,” explains Ratzesberger. “They also cannot be deep enough to provide the analytics required. With the analytics as a service as approach, users bring their data and perform their analysis in the data warehouse.”
The advent of the analytics as a service approach could not come at a better time for eBay. The firm has been expanding its virtual shopping malls, growing into other areas such as IP by its acquisition of Skype (News - Alert) while maintaining its auction business in the face of the economic downturn that has cut into volume.
Last week eBay posted third quarter revenues of $2.12 billion, up $228 million from the same period last year. Meanwhile gross merchandise volume was $14.28 billion for the quarter, a decrease of one percent over the third quarter of 2007.
“Our new analytics approach has created a culture shift to a more dynamic environment,” says Ratzesberger. “We are developing applications at speeds that were unknown to us. It is helping the marketplace by achieving greater efficiencies and implementing improvements.”
Brendan B. Read is TMCnet’s Senior Contributing Editor. To read more of Brendan’s articles, please visit his columnist page. Edited by Jessica Kostek (source: ) |
