case studies

StubHub, the online ticket marketplace and E-bay subsidiary, faced a daunting task in 2006: how to launch a successful data warehouse and business intelligence project with limited resources.

StubHub had previously flourished as an online marketplace for buyers and sellers of tickets to live entertainment and sporting events, amounting triple-digit growth since its birth in 2000.

But by 2006 a limited technology infrastructure threatened the company’s long-term survival. StubHub’s access to data, customers and business drivers were inefficient and outdated.

«We didn’t have a data warehouse or a centralized reporting mechanism, and we had not indentified the core metrics of the company and what the key performance indicators of the company were,» said Rob Singer, director of customer intelligence at StubHub in 2006, according to the online publication Online Marketing Strategies and Tactics.

Enter Strategic Enterprise Solutions (SESIdw).

Their approach to StubHub’s dilemma combined open-source technology with best of breed software tools, providing a scalable warehouse infrastructure.

The San Francisco-based information technology company injected StubHub with flexibility by directing cross functional teams comprised of database administrators (DBA), quality assurance analysts (QA) and production support. Additionally, SESIdw created a system administrator, a production and development manager and a database developer. StubHub also started using open-source software, which freed up its business intelligence team to focus on other projects.

SESIdw overhauled StubHub’s IT infrastructure to boost access to data and drastically reduced data latency. StubHub now quantifies customer value and maximizes site conversion rates.

In short, SESIdw renovated StubHub’s data warehouse system from the ground up.

The results speak for themselves. StubHub lowered its nightly data warehouse processing by 50 percent by redesigning ETL mappings and data gathering methodology. SESIdw boosted StubHub’s overall value by 10 percent thanks to its marketing effectiveness and by enhancing its systems to be SOX compliant. StubHub also applied web analytics, boosting its site conversion rate by 8.5 percent in 2006. The result? An additional $5.4 million in revenue that year.

Acquired by EBay in 2007 for $310 million, StubHub thrives on aftermarket, or secondary, ticket selling—tickets typically sold after initial box office sale. Ticket sellers set their price on StubHub and pay a 15 percent fee, while buyers pay a 10 percent fee. Secondary tickets represent a $10 billion annual market, according to StubHub.

Strategic Enterprise Solutions Inc. is a leader in the business intelligence markets, delivering its expertise to the ecommerce, health care, financial services and education industries. SESIdw has provided scalable data warehouse and business intelligence solutions for Fortune 500 companies like Wells Fargo, Hewitt Packard and Google since its inception in 1997.

In 2008 the security software giant Symantec embarked on a massive undertaking.

Symantec launched an effort to centralize customer information with the goal of creating a single view of customers that would result in targeted and differentiated customer information.

No easy task for the world’s largest maker of security software.

The Freemont California-based company needed a data integration solution that provided a 360-degree view of its customers—one that would generate customer profiles, including information about their online purchases, trial ware downloads, online registration and payments. The data solution would also need to enhance integration capabilities to acquire and synchronize data.

Symantec hired San Francisco-based Strategic Enterprise Solutions (SESIdw), a leader in data warehousing and business intelligence to help centralize its massive 50-terabyte customer data hub. The colossal task comprised, among other things, of melding 18 heterogeneous data sources from third party vendors into a single enterprise data warehouse.

SESIdw performed project management duties to drive several projects from conception to completion. SESIdw’s multipronged approach consisted of analyzing phase progress, performing a gap analysis, designing a phase 2 architecture for the data hub and working with every organization involved in the project to implement phase 2 designs. SESIdw achieved this, in part, by serving as a liaison between Symantec’s business and technology sectors to translate business requirements to functional specifications.

The results were just what Symantec sought: a company-wide, 360-view of its customers.

SESIdw helped Symantec attain a 300 percent increase in data quality by developing functional specifications that leverage best practices for data warehousing and business intelligence. Symantec also increased its market base by 7.2 million prospective customers after improving data quality within customer matching logic.

Additionally, SESIdw’s expertise improved Symantec’s data quality and maintainability by developing extensive functional specifications garnered after years of executing best practices in the data warehousing and business intelligence fields.

In addition to providing accurate and enriched customer information, SESIdw’s data solution for Symantec has increased customer satisfaction via more targeted customer service. Symantec’s comprehensive customer profiles now result in improved cross-sells and up-sell efforts. And a business process has been streamlined by eliminating manual work brought on by poor data.

Symantec now seamlessly monitors customer activity, including online sales, trial ware downloads, activation, rebate, registration, payments and billing, renewal subscriptions, survey, support, direct marketing and campaign effectiveness.