Tessera Builds Integrated Marketing System with Eddie Bauer, 1.2 Terabyte DW Project Completed in Less Than a Year
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Tessera Enterprise Systems (TES), a marketing systems integrator and provider of customer relationship management (CRM) solutions and Eddie Bauer, a wholly owned subsidiary of Spiegel, Inc. and international specialty retailer of active casual lifestyle merchandise, have announced the completion of Eddie Bauer's new consolidated database marketing system. The Eddie Bauer integrated marketing system, built by Tessera, provides Eddie Bauer with the tools to understand, anticipate and respond to customer needs and preferences. Tessera completed the project within just ten months, allowing Eddie Bauer to leverage the system for the 1998 holiday season and to see business results in the next 12 months.

Tessera linked Eddie Bauer's corporate marketing goals with sophisticated systems integration capabilities to deliver rapid results and increased revenues. The new marketing system can analyze information, provide quality data and furnish marketing specialists with a method of obtaining total customer information. This will ensure that Eddie Bauer's marketing campaigns operate effectively and efficiently. A key component to the new system, a rapid modeling environment (RME), allows Eddie Bauer to evaluate customers to target their marketing and merchandising according to customers' shopping behavior.

In order to link Eddie Bauer's business marketing objectives with an effective technology strategy, Tessera worked closely with the company to identify its overall business goals and technology capabilities. The implemented system will provide Eddie Bauer with updated data warehousing capabilities and a number of anticipated business benefits.

"Eddie Bauer is known for its exceptional customer relationships," said Tessera President Tim Hult. "Tessera was thrilled to have the opportunity to work with a phenomenal marketing team whose commitment to getting the job done allowed us to complete a superior system in a short timeframe."

There are four components to the system; the data warehouse, a data mart consisting of a sample of the customers in the warehouse, and a Sagent decision support system (DSS) ad hoc query tool. The fourth and key component, the rapid modeling environment (RME), a custom application built by Tessera and based on the SAS suite of products, allows Eddie Bauer to perform analyses based on a total picture of customer shopping behavior. The data warehouse is 600 gigabytes and the entire system is 1.2 terabytes of total disk space, and is estimated to grow substantially. The system consists of an unprecedented architecture that combines IBM's DB2 Universal Database on Sun Microsystems' most powerful server, the Sun Enterprise 10000 server (popularly known as Starfire).

"Anchoring the Eddie Bauer integrated marketing system on IBM DB2 Universal Database indicates the power and performance our database server solution provides for large-scale applications such as this," said Jim Kelly, vice president, data management marketing, IBM Software Solutions. "We are pleased to be working with Tessera because they share our commitment to developing exceptional technology solutions."

Using a Dynamic System Domain architecture, the Starfire server is separated into 3 partitions: the main warehouse, the data mart, and the RME. These partitions create logically separate machines but provide an excellent transfer performance rate of 12 gigabytes/sec between them. The Starfire server is configured with 24 processors (16, 4, 4 respectively) and 12 gigabytes of main memory (8, 2, 2 respectively). The entire platform is located at Spiegel's main data center in Westmont, IL. The users, located at Eddie Bauer headquarters in Redmond, WA will access the system via a high-speed network.

Tessera Enterprise Systems is a marketing systems integrator dedicated to building and enhancing large-scale customer relationship management systems. Tessera was founded in 1995 by a group of marketing, technology and database software professionals who envisioned a solutions methodology tied directly to clients' strategic business objectives. With facilities in the United States and in Europe, Tessera provides intelligent marketing solutions to companies around the world.

Additional information is available on Tessera's Web site at http://www.tesent.com Eddie Bauer, a leading specialty store and catalog retailer, offers casual lifestyle clothing, accessories and home furnishings through its three concepts: Eddie Bauer, A/K/A Eddie Bauer and Eddie Bauer Home. In its 78-year history, Eddie Bauer has evolved from a single store in Seattle to an international company with nearly 500 stores and more than 120 million catalogs in the U.S., Canada, Japan, Germany and the United Kingdom. Eddie Bauer Inc. is a wholly owned subsidiary of Spiegel Inc. Additional information is available on Eddie Bauer's Web site at http://www.eddiebauer.com