Magnify Analytic Solutions — a wholly-owned division of Detroit, Michigan-based Marketing Associates — uses technology-driven data analysis to offer clients a range of informed business services that increase profitability through its four lines of service: business intelligence, digital intelligence, credit risk management, and marketing analyt­ics. Magnify works with Marketing Associates’ blue-chip portfolio of Fortune-100 clients — including BMW Financial Services, Comcast, Ford Motor Company, Jaguar Cars, TD Bank, and Whirlpool.

Magnify has built broad expertise around its legacy RDBMS environment, processing large datasets for customers to support deliverables such as online marketing contests and product giveaways. These campaigns can generate 200,000 hits in the first minute, with one household brand’s giveaway generating 1.5 million products in a single day.

Today, data moves between the Cloudera enterprise data hub and Magnify's incumbent relational data warehouse using Apache Sqoop or Apache Flume. Magnify users interact with the data hub using a variety of tools, depending on their preferences and skill sets, including Apache Hive, Apache Pig, Cloudera Search, Impala, SAS (which leverages the SAS/ACCESS Interface to Impala), and Tableau. The data hub is authenticated using Kerberos, and will implement Apache Sentry for role-based security soon. Magnify's infrastructure is SSAE 16 certified and HIPAA compliant.

Magnify’s continually evolving production environment frequently has to cope with the addition of new data sources.

This reduces security risk by not having important customer data in multiple places, ensures that the business is always leveraging the cleanest data, and enables Magnify to track data without any breaks in the lineage path.

By deploying Impala and allowing for self-service data discovery, Magnify can offer clients a web-based solution through which they interact directly with Hadoop. Where they used to distribute Microsoft Excel reports to customers every one or two days, deal­ers now can search on their own by customer, sales deal, or even service type. Impala is used to query millions of rows to identify specific records that match the dealers’ criteria.