Clients

eBay Sold on Business Insight Benefits
Commentary by Patrick Firouzian, Senior Manager, Information Management Group, eBay

Few e-commerce sites can match the success of eBay, the world’s largest and most popular online trading service. Since its launch in 1995, eBay has grown at an astonishing rate, both nationally and internationally. Today, the site boasts nearly 30 million registered users and millions of items for sale across thousands of categories. It’s not hard to understand why eBay needed to find a way to capture, manage, and process the torrent of customer relationship management (CRM) data and Web site statistics that flow through the site 24 x 7.

In just six months, a 16-member multi-vendor development team created the eBay business intelligence system, known internally as Cosmos. Built using PowerCenter from Informatica Corp. as the data integration platform, the Cosmos system provides insight to users across the enterprise to improve the buying experience, measure marketing success, better target customer groups, and manage vast volumes of transactional and clickstream data.

The self-service analytic system enables up to 1,000 users across the eBay enterprise to find answers to their questions within hours rather than the days or weeks it took previously. Cosmos also serves as the integration hub for customer and financial information from eBay sister companies, to provide a consolidated view of customers and business performance.
Some of the key goals of the Cosmos project included the following:

•	Analyze/segment customers at detailed or aggregated levels
•	Measure impact of partnerships
•	Analyze new/existing features on a timely basis
•	Enforce corporate definitions (revenue classifications, CRU derivation, etc.)
•	Understand activity across/within geography/ site (country, regions, sites, etc.)
•	BMS Sales and Marketing data warehouse
•	Provide the foundation for value-added applications such as campaign management, fraud detection, extranet, early bad payer detection, popular searches, and customer affinity analysis

Informatica PowerCenter Ties It Together

According to the senior manager for the Cosmos project, Patrick Firouzian, one of the key early decisions made by the Cosmos team was the selection of PowerCenter from Informatica Corp. as the project’s data integration platform. The team looked at a wide range of data warehousing and business intelligence tools and solutions before choosing Informatica.

"Informatica’s stability and scalability immediately lifted Informatica PowerCenter over the competition," Firouzian noted. "I’ve also experienced success using Informatica at three other companies, which helped move it to the top of the list. The system’s scalability allows us to provide Cosmos users with ubiquitous access to every component of the revenue equation and help drive these components up, such as increasing the number of hits per item, increasing the selling price per item, and increasing the number of registrations."

According to Firouzian, the Cosmos team used Informatica PowerCenter to integrate approximately three terabytes of structured information. The largest fact tables contain over 500 million records. Using Informatica, eBay can add, alter, or remove data sources without affecting service levels.

Some of the design features built into the Cosmos system include:

•	Ability to manage vast amounts of information (80 to 100 million records daily) and remain available 24 x 7
•	Tiered systems to minimize impact on eBay production site and business users
•	Reconciliation processes to guarantee the accuracy of the information reported externally
•	Auction information that can be extracted and shared with partners via a self-service extranet

Benefits Abound

Before implementing the Cosmos system, eBay managed a backlog queue of 25 to 30 report requests per month. That backlog was completely eliminated by the high availability and ease of access to information regardless of its source. The cost for maintenance and generation of the reports (seven developers, two managers) was also eliminated. eBay staff is now focusing on more value-added tasks such as data quality, new releases, and helping users leverage the information and tools.

Through the information contained in the Cosmos system, the return-on-investment of planned features can be estimated before development, helping to maximize resources and user community benefits. eBay can also quantify the impact of new features or marketing campaigns immediately after launch.

eBay’s closed-loop E-BI architecture, with Informatica as the data integration layer, supporting users in marketing, finance, customer support, international, and executives.

Case Study Source: http://www.dw-institute.com/research/display.asp?id=5412