If your business is data, what happens if you put the data in the hands of your clients? Can you enable better and faster decisions by your customers? Allowing customers to develop their own insights from your data delivers far more value than providing every customer with the same view of your data. FICO holds a wealth of information about the financial habits of millions of people around the globe. FICO’s business is helping their clients make decisions based on this data. NetApp SolidFire storage is helping FICO deliver a consistently high performing suite of applications to FICOs customers.
FICO is a true Big Data business. They were the first credit scoring business and over many years have accumulated a huge amount of information about individual’s financial behavior. At the start, this was simply used to identify whether a single person could be trusted with a loan. With the advent of computers, it became possible to do analytics across larger populations of people. The combination of a huge amount of data and explosive growth of available processing power has enabled far more insights into financial behavior. The end result is better decision making by FICO clients. The challenge for these clients is developing the analytics that provide these insights can be a slow process. The solution has been to develop an analytics cloud.
Building a private cloud to allow customers to analyze financial data about third parties is a challenge. The privacy, confidentiality, and data sovereignty issues are daunting. Yet this is exactly what FICO has done with the FICO Analytics Cloud. FICOs customers are able to develop their own insight into FICO’s vast amount of data. The sheer volume of data presents challenges. The underlying storage needs to deliver capacity for the ever growing data about financial habits. A scale-out architecture will be critical to maintaining performance as the volume of data grows. In addition, time performance is crucial for an analytics platform. Modelling and reporting tasks need to complete in time for decision support. Extreme performance will enable ad-hoc reporting and analysis, enabling customers to respond faster to changing business conditions.
A crucial part of any multi-tenant environment is delivering consistent resources to each tenant, irrespective of the actions of the other tenants. A report that took a minute to complete yesterday, should take a minute to complete today. Other customers needing reports because of a market shift in Asia should not cause the report to take fifteen minutes. To deliver this enterprise performance guarantee requires a storage array with quality of service built-in. FICO chose NetApp SolidFire arrays. The SolidFire architecture is a scale-out, all-flash array with built in quality of service. Early SolidFire customers were service providers looking for a great multi-tenant storage system. More recently SolidFire has had a lot of attention from enterprises that want a single platform to consolidate storage for virtualization.
FICO is using NetApp SolidFire storage to enable its Analytics Cloud. The Analytics cloud is then enabling FICOs customers to develop new applications 70% faster. The promise of combining big data with cloud technologies is business enablement through faster access to better data. The FICO Analytics Cloud is delivering on this promise. Check out NetApp’s FICO Customer Story here.
Note: This post series is sponsored by NetApp
