BILLERICA, Mass., Dec. 15, 2009 – ForeclosureRadar, an online tracker of real estate foreclosure information, is using the Vertica Analytic Database as a marketing tool for making sense of the turbulent and often mysterious foreclosure market.
Without a dollar spent on marketing or public relations efforts, the company has become the media’s go-to resource for the freshest foreclosure information, thanks to its ability to rapidly divine trends and insights from its unique set of data. The company collects data on every phase of the foreclosure process, including exclusive daily auction information, on properties in five states.
ForeclosureRadar’s main job is to give investors, realtors, government and financial institutions up-to-the-minute foreclosure information and research tools. To help attract these customers, the company has gained widespread visibility in media such as The Wall Street Journal, LA Times and even “60 Minutes” by continuously dishing out interesting market stories, reports and commentary.
ForeclosureRadar had used a MySQL database with Tableau as its analytics front-end tool for discovering trends hidden within its data. But with rapid increases in the number of foreclosures and a broadening of their coverage area, queries to the data warehouse started to slow to a crawl, according to Sean O’Toole, founder and CEO.
“The foreclosure market is changing rapidly. We need to continuously slice and dice the data so that we can stay visible in the press with new and interesting trends. But the data was getting so big that the system stopped working. Queries were taking five minutes or more to run, which killed productivity and curtailed our research capabilities. With Vertica, Tableau queries take just a few seconds now,” he said.
ForeclosureRadar is using Vertica Analytic Database on the Cloud, an on-demand version of the company’s blazingly fast, MPP-based columnar database hosted on public clouds like Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). This pay-as-you-go approach enables ForeclosureRadar to create a high-performance analytic solution and scale up effortlessly as its customer roster grows, without upfront data center costs and delays.
“ForeclosureRadar is a great example of how next-generation database technology is enabling big data to be used in new, innovative ways. The company discovered that its unique data cannot only be used to provide insight to customers, but to shine a marketing light on the company’s expertise and reputation as well,” said Dave Menninger, vice president product management and marketing at Vertica.
About Vertica
Vertica Systems is the market innovator for high-performance analytic database management systems that run on industry-standard hardware. Co-founded by database pioneer Dr. Michael Stonebraker, Vertica has developed column-oriented analytic database technology with an MPP architecture that lets companies of any size store and query very large databases orders of magnitude faster and more affordably than other solutions. The Vertica Analytic Database is available as software only, as a hardware based appliance, as a virtual appliance on VMware or online as a cloud computing solution. The technology’s unmatched speed, scalability, flexibility and ease of use helps Vertica’s 100+ customers including JP Morgan Chase, Verizon, Mozilla, Comcast, Level(3) Communications and Vonage capitalize on business opportunities in real time. Vertica is headquartered in Billerica, Mass. Follow us on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/vertica. For more information, visit the company’s Web site at http://www.vertica.com.