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Netezza Spatial™

Peter Batty, GIS visionary says:

"Netezza technology changes the game by enabling enterprise location intelligence on a scale that is not possible with today’s technologies."

Netezza Spatial™: Analytics with Direction

Location data is ubiquitous. Every event happens somewhere – from sales transactions and phone calls to crimes and natural disasters; and nearly everything has a location associated with it – from customers and stores, to roads, cities and states. By combining location information with business intelligence, you can bring every information component of the business together for optimal decision making. But, while location data is increasingly being utilized in transactional systems, its use in analytics to drive the business is still relatively very low.

Why is this? Quite simply, location intelligence is complex and expensive in traditional data warehouse environments and in many cases, unable to deliver the value businesses expect from it. The cost, complexity and high level of expertise required to analyze and manipulate spatial data has historically created a divergence between GIS and IT infrastructures. The result is that the individuals who have access and understanding of spatial data cannot easily collaborate with the business users or decision-makers who would be able to use the information to improve business processes.

Netezza Spatial Changes the Course

Just as the Netezza data warehouse appliance solved traditional data warehousing and BI performance challenges, Netezza Spatial is now revolutionizing today's world of location intelligence. An extension to the Netezza appliance developed by Netezza partner Intelligent Integration Systems, Inc. (IISi), Netezza Spatial simplifies the process of bringing together location and business data in a business intelligence environment. Now you can have access to ALL the data you collect on your business for analysis, much faster, simpler and cheaper than with conventional systems. Together with our partners Idea Integration, Intergraph, MapInfo, Safe Software, SRC and thincSoft.- leaders in ETL, GIS and BI/visualization markets – we offer seamless integration and analysis of spatial and non-spatial data.

Leveraging Location Intelligence Across Industries – Faster, Easier, Cheaper

Location intelligence with Netezza Spatial presents a significant opportunity for organizations in nearly every industry to leverage location data as part of their everyday decision making to impact their business' bottom lines. Any analysis relating to business processes such as customer relationship management, targeted marketing promotions, service optimization, risk management and operational efficiency, can benefit from location data to make the best, most data-driven decisions. These are a few examples of how businesses in various industry verticals can benefit from the value provided by Netezza Spatial.

Leading global reinsurance company

This global reinsurance company uses location intelligence to enable clients to assess the risk associated with their insurance portfolios and identify sources of risk accumulation across those portfolios. The company analyzes large volumes of spatial data containing catastrophe information on multiple dimensions such as weather, wildfire and earthquake risk from different sources.

As is usually the case in many data warehouse environments, the company has a separate, dedicated system where spatial operations are performed before the results are loaded into the data warehouse for querying. This preprocessing of spatial data is time consuming and requires data to be moved between multiple systems, resulting in latency and stale data for analysis. It also makes the infrastructure management more complex.

With Netezza Spatial, the company can store and analyze all of their data, both spatial and non-spatial, on a single platform. Netezza enables querying on detailed spatial data, obviating the need to perform spatial computations before the data arrives in the data warehouse. This not only simplifies data management, but also provides their clients with more accurate risk information in near real-time.

Wireless service providers

Wireless service providers analyze data from network operations systems to determine areas of less than adequate coverage in their service regions, indicated by a higher than usual concentration of dropped calls. The analysis helps in determining the best locations for cell towers and optimizing network operations.

Spatial data in these companies is typically analyzed in dedicated GIS systems that are challenged in keeping up with data volumes generated by the network operations systems. Moreover the dedicated infrastructure adds to the cost and complexity of managing the overall environment.

With Netezza Spatial, these companies can track and analyze much larger data volumes faster than possible before. More importantly, they can integrate their network operations data with market and customer data, allowing them to better plan network capacity expansion based on customer and market demand. They can improve customer satisfaction and avoid churn by proactively determining high value customers that may be impacted by service issues.

Large retailer chains

Location is everything when it comes to retail and retailers know its importance in making or breaking the success of a store. Retailer chains typically have GIS and real estate groups that plan store expansions in new geographic areas.

Because traditional data warehouses are not able to easily accommodate spatial data processing, these groups typically have to deploy and maintain their own infrastructure for location intelligence. Site selection queries on these systems can take hours or days to run even on limited spatial and demographic data.

The ability to combine detailed demographic data with location information with Netezza Spatial can provide significant benefits to retailers. Not only can decisions be made faster and analyses executed iteratively for the best results, but they can be performed on all the data inside the data warehouse. Retailers can also utilize improve their marketing campaigns through better segmentation and targeting based on location.

Besides these examples, Netezza Spatial can bring significant performance, scalability and simplicity benefits to location intelligence applications across a variety of industry verticals, and allow more data to be integrated and analyzed for improved decision making.

Using Netezza Spatial, financial institutions can identify the best locations to open new sites for full-service centers and/or ATMs based on the locations and preferences of their customers and target markets; manufacturers can find the best places to purchase raw materials by evaluating distances, routes and fuel costs incurred throughout the procurement and distribution processes; government and law enforcement agencies can identify areas of high crime to optimize personnel deployment in different regions to prevent crime.

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Definitions and Terms

There are many terms commonly used in reference to geographically-related data. Throughout this paper we will adhere to the terms below, as widely defined by industry experts:

GIS (Geographic Information System): integrated hardware, software and data for capturing, managing, analyzing and displaying all forms of geographically referenced information

Spatial or Geospatial data: represents things that exist in space and those that are referenced to a location on the earth

Location Intelligence: adding a geographic or location-based dimension to business and predictive intelligence systems