CROSSMARK Uses SQL Server 2008 R2 Parallel Data Warehouse to Quickly Deliver Business Insights

With the growth of the consumer goods industry, sales and marketing campaigns have created large and complex databases that are hard to sift through without the right tools. As retailers approach the busy holiday shopping season, they need to have insights into the effectiveness of their campaigns. Retailers need to know what market trends are affecting their customers to maximize the reach of these campaigns and they need to be able to sort through all of this data quickly to find useful and actionable insights.

Every now and then, we like to highlight how our customers are using Microsoft’s database platform solutions now to solve for these types of needs in real-time. One such customer is CROSSMARK, a provider of sales and marketing services for manufacturers and retail companies, who recently launched a new self-service data portal powered by SQL Server 2008 R2 Parallel Data Warehouse (PDW) to bring this data and these insights to its customers. SQL Server PDW’s on-demand data access will allow CROSSMARK’s customers to leverage shopper insights and data to inform strategies and tactics to create more effective sales and marketing campaigns to boost sales and profitability.

Before implementing SQL Server PDW, CROSSMARK had a bottleneck in its legacy platform that created data reports that weren’t scalable, making employees spend valuable time with data reporting instead of working with customers. Now, with SQL Server PDW, CROSSMARK can easily scale its resources to handle the millions of in-store activities processed each year and allow CROSSMARK employees to spend more time with its customers and less time with the data.

CROSSMARK is also on-track to implement SQL Server BI tools including Power View and PowerPivot to provide more business intelligence tools to its customers.

To read more about CROSSMARK, take a look at this Customer Spotlight feature on News Center.