StayFriends trusts in EXASOL High Performance Database

EXASolution accelerates the social website’s data analysis

Nuremberg, Germany, January 31, 2012 – EXASOL AG have won German social media pioneer StayFriends as a new customer. Their data warehouse management solution, EXASolution, primarily optimizes StayFriends’ heritage business intelligence (BI) solution. This enables real-time data analysis and evaluation, allowing for a more precise categorization of visitors to the portal. By opting for the high performance database from EXASOL, StayFriends secure their long-term decision-making basis for further extending their product portfolio and for better tailoring their services the their target groups.

StayFriends was founded in 2002. With offices in Berlin and Erlangen, it is a leading provider of online communities for friends and former classmates in Europe. The company operates social networking platforms with more than 25 million members in Germany, Austria, France and Sweden.

The company’s rapid growth, the associated growth in data volume and the increasing requirements on the BI solutions made the heritage MySQL solution reach its limits. The people in charge of BI at StayFriends therefore were looking for a new database solution with significantly higher performance while keeping the administration effort low. After a detailed selection process and tests at the in-house data center, they opted for EXASolution.

The high performance database EXASolution 4.0 has been in productive use at StayFriends since early January, 2012, as an analysis system. The generic JDBC loading interface of the EXAloader that is used to load all data from the MySQL database into EXASolution, allows for a seamless integration into the existing infrastructure. For the analysis and the reporting of the evaluation data, an in-house BI front end is used. In addition, StayFriends use the statistics and analysis software by SPSS for data mining purposes which simply connects to EXASolution via standard ODBC drivers.

The users at the StayFriends specialist departments benefit from the new self-service complete solution as they are now able to generate their own ad-hoc statistics on demand.

„With EXASolution, StayFriends can now access their data securely, flexibly, at any time, and run efficient analyses for customer segmentation in order to gain a significant competitive edge“, says Steffen Weissbarth, CEO of EXASOL AG. „Along with the good value for money and the low administration effort, StayFriends also appreciated our high-performance database.“

„We were clearly focused on having a clear separation between the portal database and the analytic database to make sure running analyses will not impact our day-to-day operations“, says Martin Funke, Senior Manager BI at StayFriends. „The decision pro EXASOL will contribute to StayFriends‘ business success“, Funke continues. “In the future, the findings gained from the analysis will be carried back into the portal in order to generate more added value for the community’s users.”

EXASOL AG, with headquarters in Nuremberg, develops and distributes the EXASolution high performance database, based on in-memory technology, which was specifically designed for enterprise warehouse applications and business intelligence solutions. This database allows for rapid analysis and evaluation of even large data volumes. Thanks to its high performance and the low administration effort, EXASolution not only supports companies in generating valuable decision making data, but also in reducing their total cost of ownership. In April 2011, Gartner awarded EXASOL AG „Cool Vendor“ in the data management and integration 2011 category. For the underlying benchmark test series, EXASolution 4.0 was already used.

About StayFriends GmbH
StayFriends GmbH is a leading provider of online communities for former classmates and friends in Europe. The company was founded in 2002 and operates social networking platforms with more than 25 million members in Germany (stayfriends.de), Austria (stayfriends.at), Switzerland (stayfriends.ch), France (trombi.com) and Sweden (stayfriends.se). Since January 2004, the Erlangen-based company is a 100% subsidiary of Classmates Online Inc. in Seattle/USA, which in turn is part of United Online, Inc., with headquarters in Los Angeles/USA.

About EXASOL AG
EXASOL AG, based in Nuremberg in Germany, develops a data management system that enables the rapid analysis and evaluation of data. By implementing the solution from EXASOL, business processes are optimised and secure foundations for decision-making are generated, which give companies of all industry sectors a sustainable competitive edge. EXASolution is a relational high-performance database that was specifically developed for enterprise warehouse applications and business intelligence solutions. The In-Memory-technology-based database is utilised by companies of all industry sectors for time-critical analyses, comprehensive data research, planning or reporting. By integrating geodata and BigData-sources as well as unstructured data EXASolution offers an additional dimension of evaluation for more efficient and ad-hoc analyses. The easy-to-manage database can be integrated easily into existing IT infrastructures and requires a minimal amount of administrative maintenance, while ensuring low investment and operation costs (TCO). EXACloud, based on EXASolution, is offered as datawarehousing as a services. By using this highly efficient way to manage their data EXASOL customers benefit as well from full data access at any time as from a transparent pricing model. Companies such as XING, Sony Music, Olympus, media control, Zalando, stayfriends, Coop, IMS Health, Semikron, Webtrekk, econda and xplosion rely on EXASOL technology, made in Germany. For more information, please visit www.EXASOL.com follow us on twitter or like us on facebook.

Monika Götzmann
EXASOL AG
Neumeyerstraße 48
90411 Nürnberg
Fon: +49 911 23 99 10
presse@exasol.com

This release was published on openPR.