Industry Analytics: Future storage trends for large data stores

This year's Teradata partner conference just closed in San Diego. One of the biggest attractions of this conference is that by tracking customers online purchase behavior retailers can achieve great advantages, and this will also have a great impact on future storage assets. Business managers cannot predict what questions they want to ask their customers in the future, nor can they say which data they collect is useful or useless. The answer is to save them all.

Many companies have relied on market research to understand how to get into the market and how to sell goods to customers. But the rise of online data, in particular social media, has led us to an explosion of information and a different measure of data on customer behavior. "As we transition from regression analysis to all the analytical tools on these networks, we can find a lot of things," says Paul Kent, vice president of research and Development at SAS.

For example, ebay's architecture and operations senior Director, Oliver Ratzesberger, points out that ebay also launched 100 different experiments on the site, involving thousands of customers and bringing in millions of data points. Therefore, ebay can have a deep understanding of how users buy products on the site. One practical example, Ratzesberger points out, is that ebay has improved the way it displays clothing. At any given time, every user on ebay can choose about 700,000 dresses, which is a hassle to pick. Through research, ebay has found that if a new feature is developed that allows users to customize search scopes such as size, style, and manufacturer, customers will welcome this feature.

Storage requirements increase further, not only because of the need to match customer behavior, but also because the organization wants to analyze the social graph of these customers. "The real advantage of the online world is the ability to keep track of customers," says Mark Jeffery of Kellog. "For example, the Canadian World Bank has a partnership with weddingbells.com to track customer interaction on the site."

But to get these precious "materials", the organization needs to build a huge interactive database that includes both its own web site and the information from the collaboration site. In fact, ebay has evolved to simply keep track of customer behavior on the site, as its Web pages change very quickly (about every five minutes). To be able to understand and analyze customer behavior, ratzesberger that they may need to store each screen that customers see in the future-a very large amount of data.