LONDON, England, May 13, 2015 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Cloudera, the leader in enterprise analytic data management powered by Apache Hadoop™, today announced that Marks & Spencer (M&S), one of the UK's leading retailers, has adopted Cloudera Enterprise, Data Hub Edition to help with its data analytics. The Cloudera platform is aiding M&S in analysing all kinds of data from multiple sources, adding data driven value across the business. The analytics system is providing a better understanding of consumer behaviour in a multichannel environment and improved device attribution modelling, helping M&S to continue improving its digital platform.
Founded in 1884, M&S has grown from a single market stall to an international, multi-channel retailer. M&S today has around 850 UK stores, 45 international stores in 54 territories, and more than 85,000 employees. The company sells stylish, high value clothing and home products, as well as outstanding quality food that is responsibly sourced from about 3,000 suppliers globally.
Jagpal Jheeta, head of Business Information and Customer Insight at M&S, said, "We evaluated potential partners that could help us build an analytics hub and complement our in-house capabilities to make data-driven decisions across the business. Smart and efficient data usage is a key focus at M&S, as it ultimately fuels better customer insight, engagement, and loyalty. We needed a scalable, robust and future-proof strategic partner. Cloudera is aiding us in leveraging analytics to better serve the business now and in the future."
M&S put together a cross functional team from Marketing, Finance, E-commerce, and IT to select a big data provider based on the following criteria:
- Ability to execute -- determined by client referenceability, successful and collaborative POC delivery, and quality of technical solutions, training, support, and professional services
- Strategic partnership opportunity -- based on ecosystem leadership, global presence (particularly in Europe), and willingness to collaborate
- Technology approach and ecosystem integration -- seeking an open, flexible, and customizable platform with a suite of built-in data ingest and analytics tools plus integrations with third party tools already in use at M&S
- Enterprise management and security -- providing an efficient, secure way to scale the big data environment to support numerous lines of business in a centralized analytics environment
Jason Foster, business solutions manager for Big Data, Analytics and Marketing at M&S, added, "Essential to M&S was the ability to work with a strategic technology partner that would help to build our big data platform alongside our in-house team. We used Cloudera University and Cloudera's Professional Services to accelerate our progress in creating a great enterprise analytics capability."
To date, M&S' main use case for big data analytics has been to develop a 360-degree customer view offering better understanding of purchase patterns and shopping behaviors across channels. The end goal: to design the perfect customer experience.
Dave Shuman, consumer products and retail subject matter expert at Cloudera, said, "M&S is a shining example of a retailer who is embracing the opportunity of big data to perfect the customer experience across all channels. Cloudera is honoured to partner with them while they expand the depth and breadth of use cases supported by the enterprise data hub, such as plugging in campaign management, customer loyalty data, and data from digital assets to help create more personalized and targeted communications."
About Cloudera
Cloudera is revolutionizing enterprise data management by offering the first unified Platform for big data, an enterprise data hub built on Apache Hadoop. Cloudera offers enterprises one place to store, access, process, secure, and analyze all their data, empowering them to extend the value of existing investments while enabling fundamental new ways to derive value from their data. Cloudera's open source big data platform is the most widely adopted in the world, and Cloudera is the most prolific contributor to the open source Hadoop ecosystem. As the leading educator of Hadoop professionals, Cloudera has trained over 30,000 individuals worldwide. Over 1,450 partners and a seasoned professional services team help deliver greater time to value. Finally, only Cloudera provides proactive and predictive support to run an enterprise data hub with confidence. Leading organizations in every industry plus top public sector organizations globally run Cloudera in production.
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