TechTarget – Big data challenges include what info to use—and what not to
RichRelevance Inc. faces one of the prototypical big data challenges: lots of data, and not a lot of time to analyze it. For example, the marketing analytics services provider runs an online recommendation engine for Target, Sears, Neiman Marcus, Kohl’s and other retailers. Its predictive models, running on a Hadoop cluster, must be able to deliver product recommendations to shoppers in 40 to 60 milliseconds — not a simple task for a company that has two petabytes of customer and product data in its systems, a total that grows as retailers update and expand their online product catalogs.
