MasterCard Takes Stake in Data Analytics Firm

As big data continues to be collected and stored, more commercial businesses are seeing the high value of analyzing that data, and are choosing partners who specialize in large data set analytics to assist with extracting business insight from petabytes of data. Here's some recent examples of big data partnerships.

MasterCard takes stake in Mu Sigma

MasterCard Advisors, a division of MasterCard (MA) and analytics firm Mu Sigma announced a new partnership that combines MasterCard Advisors' aggregated and anonymous purchase behavior insights with Mu Sigma's advanced analytics and expertise. As part of the partnership MasterCard has acquired an equity stake in Mu Sigma. The two companies will jointly develop innovative analytic products to enable companies of all sizes to solve their business challenges.

"The data analytics market is rapidly growing as customers seek real time insight allowing them to better connect with their consumers through highly relevant products, offers and services," said Gary Kearns, Executive Vice President, Information Services for MasterCard Advisors. "We went through an extensive process to choose the right partner and Mu Sigma's innovation labs and capabilities make them stand out as best-in-class in this field. By combining MasterCard Advisors' purchase behavior insights with Mu Sigma's expertise we will be able to drive faster innovations in data analytics solutions and deliver them on a broader scale, globally."

Northbrook Illinois-based Mu Sigma is a decision science and analytics company that serves many large global organizations in health care, insurance, finance, retail and technology companies such as Microsoft and Dell. It combines innovation in analytics with its interdisciplinary approach combining business, math and technology and using proprietary products, assets, methodologies and people. According to research by Wikibon the big data analytics market is expected to be a $50 billion market opportunity within five years.

"Big Data analytics is growing at a tremendous pace," said Dhiraj Rajaram, CEO of Mu Sigma. "We have deep experience in this area, probably more than any other provider, and MasterCard Advisors has been leading in data analytics for a number of years among payments companies. We believe the combination of MasterCard's deep data and information insights expertise when exposed to Mu Sigma's Big Data analytics ecosystem will add tremendous value to various businesses. We're looking forward to working closely with MasterCard to help drive innovation across multiple industries and help businesses succeed in new and smarter ways."

Yahoo! Japan Upgrades Teradata Analytics platform

Teradata (TDC) announced that Yahoo Japan Corporation has renewed and updated its analytical data systems with the Teradata Active Enterprise Data Warehouse Platform 6690, Teradata’s latest high-end model, for its data warehouse (DWH), the largest DWH analytics platform in Japan.

Yahoo JAPAN has also implemented a new application known as “Access-Navigator Web,” a web-based data search tool. This software enables an employee without training in SQL to perform data analysis – by freely manipulating and integrating data on the new Teradata system. This lowers employee learning curves for SQL training and increases the number of users who can perform analytics.

Yahoo Japan manages about 120,000 queries daily. The deployment of the newest Teradata technology, completed at the end of November 2012, provides high efficiency and speed – with response times now running 200 to 250 percent faster than the prior systems.