Was it really just three years ago that an IT leader needed nerves of steel to commit to a business-critical application that used Hadoop? As Epsilon's VP of Products Bob Zurek can tell you: It was.

While the open source big data framework was considered a huge gamble for digital marketing agency Epsilon three years ago, the company couldn’t be more pleased with its bet-the-company technology choice. Consider Epsilon’s position today as described at SAS Global Forum 2015 by Zurek:

• Speed — With its core marketing application running on Cloudera Hadoop, Epsilon can now “operate at high speeds, faster than we ever expected” when the market requires immediate action.
• Cost-savings — As the cost of mailings has been on the rise, Epsilon is seeing the cost per mailing starting to decline.
• Data-driven decisions — Epsilon is now able to use much more data in its analytics, allowing the company to make more effective decisions.

In his presentation, “How big data and Hadoop provide a competitive advantage,” Zurek said the decision to move from two older applications to a new, single application it dubbed “Harmony” was a major modernization effort for the company. Epsilon has 70 global offices, 7,000 staffers (150 of them data scientists) and 1.5 billion customer records.

He said the decision to rebuild its core applications was chancy and there were plenty of doubters: “People said we were crazy — Hadoop isn’t mature enough and didn’t have the needed security.”

Zurek told the Global Forum audience, “We took a big, risky bet that our competitors didn’t — and it’s paid off. We’re in awesome shape right now.” The marketing firm is now in production with several Hadoop clusters of more than 50 nodes.

No doubt about it, Hadoop is growing up fast. Speakers at the conference said that approximately two-thirds of the companies with a significant analytics investment have already deployed Hadoop in their organizations.

SAS has invested in Hadoop maturity in its modernization efforts too, introducing powerful products such as SAS Data Loader for Hadoop, as well as SAS Visual Analytics and SAS Visual Statistics for Hadoop.

Companies dabbling in Hadoop should take a page from Epsilon and seize a competitive advantage by modernizing their big data analytics and infrastructure. Download this white paper to learn more: Bringing the power of SAS to Hadoop