Cees van Leuveren, business intelligence specialist at CCV, takes up the story: “Now, life is much easier with Exasol.” However, this was not always the case. Payment and software solutions lie at the heart of the business. For the development of their products, CCV must know exactly whether all pro-cesses run smoothly and whether they are being developed in the right manner. In order to achieve this, various questi-ons must be answered. For example: Are internal processes running correctly? Are all payments running smoothly through CCV’s systems? Are the customers satisfied? Is the CCV team offering good customer support? Ultimately, the answers to these questions serve to improve product quality, customer perception and customer service. The market leader used to process all this inbound data from payment terminals in the Netherlands in different ways. Most of the data was stored in different data silos, predominantly in a MS SQL, DB2 or MySQL database. It was very time-consuming to process and bring together all this data sensibly; data often had to be merged before it could be analyzed. Analytic queries were almost impossible; they took too long to run and were too cumber-some. Furthermore, data volumes were steadily increasing in terms of size and complexity, as there were a lot of different data types coming in from terminals and machines. Therefore, the solution the company was using eventually hit a wall. Alt-hough it would have been possible to remedy the situation by purchasing extra licenses and capacity, it would not have been a real viable financial alternative in the long term.

With more than 55 years of experience, CCV is one of the leading suppliers of payment solutions in Europe. As a family business with roots in the Netherlands and as a partner in the branch retail sec-tor, CCV specializes in the processing and authorization of financial and loyalty card transactions, as well as the development and management of loyalty and customer card systems. Employing close to 1,000 people, the head office of CCV is locat-ed in Arnhem, The Netherlands, and the company has further branches in Bel-gium, Germany and Switzerland. In order to ensure rapid and secure payments at every point of interaction, and the optimal provision of omni-channel solutions for CCV’s customers, the payment solutions specialist has chosen to rely on Exasol’s analytic in-memory database.

Success Story CCV

Comprehensive data analytics that redefines the customer experience

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Convinced by the proof-of-concept: speed and first-class support

In 2013, a proof-of-concept (POC) was carried out at CCV within the framework of a test license. Cees van Leuveren, Business Intelligence Specialist at CCV comments on this: “We loaded the test system with the large data sets we had trouble querying before with our old systems and wanted to see how Exasol would query the data. Exasol was fast! It just worked, first time!” Van Leuveren was also enthusiastic about the pro-duct’s scalability and Exasol’s technical support. “It was a pretty straightforward process; Exasol’s technical support has been great, very responsive and always on-hand to offer great advice, tips and tricks.”

Coordination of infrastructure and usage

Today, Exasol is used mainly to analyze product development, product quality and process quality. CCV also runs specially tai-lored ERP calculations and uses different data models as part of the process. Amongst others, it also uses a logical data model which contains lots of table joins. According to Leuveren, these can be calculated by Exasol on the fly. “Exasol is fantastic for this,” says van Leuveren. “Other proprietary databases would have a lot more difficulty.” In order to extract data sets and load them into the Exasol database, CCV uses ETL tools from Talend, while Qlik and Excel are used as a BI front end. If the company wants to run deep-dive statistical analytic queries, with Exasol, CCV can run them using ‘R’ on the database, which means that Exasol guarantees a high degree of flexibility

in its usage. However, it is not only here that the CCV team is supported well. The possiblilty for additional tools was also a bonus. For example the integration of user-defined functions (UDFs) - which then offer CCV completely new possibilities for analysis.

Van Leuveren sums up: “For us at CCV, agile development is essential, so having a database that supports that is incredibly important. We can sit down together with customers, change a process or product feature, analyze its benefits immediately and see if the customer likes it or not. Therefore, Exasol really does accelerate software development cycles at CCV; we can run through different scenarios much more dynamically and with more agility than ever before.”

Exasol has proven that it significantly advances product de-velopment at CCV. CCV’s decisions are based on data, facts and analysis and, because of this, the database brings a clear added value to the business.

„It’s refreshing to work with Exasol, it’s an analytic database that we can rely on wholeheartedly – it just works!“from the left: Cees van Leuveren / Business Intelligence Specialist at CCV Rob Reijmers / Data Warehouse Specialist at CCV

Success Story / CCV

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