1. Customer Brief ®
Experian Increases Insights and Speed to
Market with MapR
Experian is an international information services organization with global
revenues of $4.8 billion and 16,000 employees. The company has four primary
business lines: credit services, decision analytics, direct-to-consumer products,
and a marketing services group.
The rapid growth of the credit reference industry and the market for credit risk
management services set the stage for the reliance on increasing amounts of con-
sumer and business data. This has culminated in an explosion of big data—data
that is Experian’s life’s blood.
As the company added new products and new sets of data quality rules, more data
had to be processed in the same or less time. It was time to upgrade. But simply
adding to the existing Windows/SAN system was too cumbersome and expensive.
Experian chose the MapR Distribution including Hadoop to move beyond the
restraints of their in-house database while increasing processing power, lowering
costs, and devising new ways to store more easily accessible data.
The group upgraded to a Linux-based HPC cluster with six nodes. “We have a
single customer solution right now. But as we get new customers who can use
this kind of capability, we can add additional nodes and storage and processing
capacity at the same time,” says Tom Thomas, director of the Data Development
Technology Group within the Consumer Services Division.
“Our first solution includes well-known and defined metrics and aggregations.
We leverage DMX-h from Syncsort to determine metrics for each record and
pre-aggregate other metrics, which are then stored in Hadoop to be used in
downstream analytics as well as real-time rules based actions,” he says. “Our
second solution follows a traditional data operations flow, except in this case
we use DMX-h to prepare in-bound source data that is then stored in the MapR
Distribution including Hadoop. Then we run Experian-proprietary models that
read the data via Hive and create client-specific and industry-unique results.”
MapR Solution
The Challenge
“Experian chose the MapR
Distribution including
Hadoop to move beyond
the restraints of their
in-house database while
increasing processing
power, lowering costs,
and devising new ways
to store more easily
accessible data.”
Tom Thomas
Director of Data Development
Technology Group
Consumer Services Division
The Business

2. www.mapr.com ®
Experian uses MapR to
store and process more
financial data faster,
providing clients with
enhanced insights and
services.
“Overall, we are seeing
reduced storage expenses
while gaining processing
and store capabilities and
capacities. This translates
into an improved speed
to market for our busi-
ness units. It also posi-
tions our group to grow
our Hadoop ecosystem
to meet future big data
requirements.”
Tom Thomas
Director of Data Development
Technology Group
Consumer Services Division
Flexible data access with NFS
MapR is the only distribution for
Hadoop that leverages the full power
of NFS for remote access to shared
disks across the network. “All our solu-
tions leverage MapR NFS functionality,”
Thomas continues. “This allows us to
transition from our previous internal
or SAN storage to Hadoop by mount-
ing the cluster directly. In turn, this
provides us with access to the data via
HDFS and Hadoop environment tools,
such as Hive.”
More storage and increased
processing speed
“We are realizing increased processing
speed which leads to shorter delivery
times. In addition, reduced storage
expenses means that we can store more,
not acquire less. Both the company’s
internal operations and our clients have
access to deeper data supporting and
aiding insights into their business areas,”
he says.
Faster time to market for the
business units
“Overall, we are seeing reduced stor-
age expenses while gaining processing
and store capabilities and capacities.
This translates into an improved speed
to market for our business units. It
also positions our group to grow our
Hadoop ecosystem to meet future big
data requirements,” he says.
Benefits
By taking advantage of Hadoop using MapR, the Experian team got:
• Substantially more processing power and storage space
• Increased processing speed leading to shorter delivery times
• Reduced storage expenses so they can store more.
Content based on Coping with Big Data at Experian—“Don’t Wait, Don’t Stop,” September 1, 2014, Datanami.com
MapR delivers on the promise of Hadoop with a proven, enterprise-grade platform that supports a broad set of mission-
critical and real-time production uses. MapR brings unprecedented dependability, ease-of-use and world-record speed to
Hadoop, NoSQL, database and streaming applications in one unified distribution for Hadoop. MapR is used by more than
500 customers across financial services, government, healthcare, manufacturing, media, retail and telecommunications as
well as by leading Global 2000 and Web 2.0 companies. Amazon, Cisco, Google and HP are part of the broad MapR partner
ecosystem. Investors include Google Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Mayfield Fund, NEA, Qualcomm Ventures and
Redpoint Ventures. MapR is based in San Jose, CA © 2014 MapR Technologies, Inc.