Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how Yellow Pages helps small businesses attract, reach out to, and retain customers using big data.

1. Powerful Reporting Prowess From Enterprise Data
Warehouse Helps YP Build New Businesses for SMBs
Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how Yellow Pages helps small businesses
attract, reach out to, and retain customers using big data.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Sponsor:
Hewlett Packard Enterprise.
Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to the next edition of the HP Enterprise (HPE)
Discover Podcast series. I’m Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions,
your host and moderator for this ongoing discussion on IT innovation and how it’s
making an impact on people’s lives.
Our next big-data innovation case study highlights how Yellow Pages (YP)
has experimented with and built out a full enterprise data warehouse with
powerful reporting capabilities.
We’ll learn how YP pulls massive data and information from across new
and legacy resources to report precise metrics to its advertisers, making
them more aware about their campaigns and how small businesses are fairing.
To learn more, let’s welcome our guest, Bill Theisinger, Vice President of Engineering
for Platform Data Services at YP in Glendale, California. Welcome, Bill.
Bill Theisinger: Thank you, Dana.
Gardner: Good to have you with us. Tell us a little bit about YP, the digital arm of what
people would have known as the Yellow Pages a number of years ago. You're all about
helping small businesses become better acquainted with their customers and vice versa.
Hewlett Packard Enterprise
Vertica Community Edition
Start Your Free Trial Now
Theisinger: Correct. YP is a leading local marketing solutions provider in the U.S.,
dedicated to helping local businesses and communities grow. We help connect local
businesses with consumers wherever they are and whatever device they are on, desktop
and mobile.
Gardner: As we know, the world has changed dramatically around marketing and
advertising and connecting buyers and sellers. So in the digital age, being precise, being
aware, being visible is everything, and that means data. Tell us a little bit about your data
requirements in this new world.
Gardner

2. Theisinger: We need to be able to capture how consumers interact with our customers
and that includes where they interact, whether it’s a mobile device or web
device, and also within our network of partners. We reach about 100
million consumers across the U.S and we do that through our YP network
and our partner network.
Gardner: Tell us too about the evolution. Obviously, you don’t build out
data capabilities and infrastructure overnight. Some things are in place, and
you move on, you learn, adapt, and you have new requirements. Tell us a
little bit about the story and how it unfolded around your data warehouse journey.
Needed to evolve
Theisinger: Yellow Pages saw the shift of their print business moving heavily online and
becoming heavily digital. We needed to evolve with that, of course. In doing so, we
needed to build infrastructure around the systems that we were using to support the
businesses we were helping to grow.
And in doing that, we started to take a look at what the systems requirements were for us
to be able to report and message value to our advertisers.
That included understanding where consumers were
looking, what we were impressing to them, what
businesses we were showing them when they searched,
what they were clicking on, and, ultimately what
businesses they called. We track all of those different
metrics.
When we started this adventure, we didn't have the technology and the capabilities to be
able to do those things. So we had to reinvent our infrastructure. That’s what we did
Gardner: And as we know, getting more information to your advertisers to help them in
their selection and spending expertise is key. It differentiates companies. So this is a core
proposition for you. This is at the heart of your business, not at a nice to have or
something behind the curtains.
Given the mission criticality, what are the requirements? What did you need to do to get
that reporting, that warehouse capability. Then, tell us a little bit about your selection
process.
Theisinger: We need to be able to scale to the size of our network and the size of our
partner network, which means no click left behind, if you will, no impression untold, no
search unrecognized. That's billions of events we process every day. We needed to look
at something that would help us scale. If we added a new partner, if we expanded the YP
network, if we added hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of new advertisers, we
needed the infrastructure to able to help us do that.
Theisinger

3. Gardner: I understand that you've been using Hadoop. You might be looking at other
technologies as they emerge. Tell us about your Hadoop experience and how that relates
to your reporting capabilities?
Bill Theisinger When I joined YP, Hadoop was a heavy buzz product in the industry. It
was a proven product for helping businesses process large amounts of unstructured data.
However, it still poses a problem. That unstructured data needs to be structured at some
point, and it’s that structure that you report to advertisers and report internally.
That's how we decided that we needed to marry two different technologies -- one that will
allow us to scale a large unstructured processing environment like Hadoop and one that
will allow us to scale a large structured environment like Vertica.
Business impact
Gardner: Interesting. How has this impacted your business, now that you've been able
to do this and it's been in the works for quite a while? Any metrics of success or
anecdotes that can relate back to how the people in your organization are consuming
those metrics and then extending that as service and product back into your market?
What's been the result?
Theisinger: We have roughly about 10,000 jobs that we run every day, both to process
data and also for analytics. That data represents about five to six petabytes of data that
we've been able to capture about consumers, their behaviors, and activities. So we
process that data within our Hadoop environment. We then pass that along into Vertica,
structure it in a way that we can have analysts, product owners, and other systems
retrieve it, pull and look at those metrics, and be able to report on them to the advertisers.
Hewlett Packard Enterprise
Vertica Community Edition
Start Your Free Trial Now
Gardner: Is there an automation to this evolving, as you look to present a more and
better analytics say on top of the Vertica? What are you doing to make that customizable
to people based on their needs, but at the same time, controlled and managed so that it
doesn't become unwieldy?
Theisinger: There is a lot of interaction between customers, both internal and external,
when we decide how and what we’re going to present in terms of data, and there are a lot
of ways we do that. We present data externally through an advertiser portal. So we want
to make sure we work very closely with HFE and the UX designers as well as our
advertisers, through focus groups, workshops, and understanding what they want to
understand about the data that we present them.

4. Then, internally, we decide what would make sense and how we feel comfortable being
able to present it to them, because we have a universe of a lot more data than what we
probably want to show people.
We also do the same thing internally. We've been able to provide various teams internally
whether its sales, marketing, or finance, insights into who's clicking on various business
listings, who's viewing various businesses, who’s calling businesses, what their
segmentation is, and what their demographics look like and it allows us a lot of analytical
insight. We do most of that work through the analytics platforms, which is, in this case,
Vertica.
Gardner: Now, that user experience is becoming more and more important. It wasn't that
long ago when these reports were going to people who were data scientists or equivalent,
but now we're taking the amount to those 600,000 small businesses. Can you tell us a
little bit about lessons learned when it comes to delivering an end analytics product,
versus building out the warehouse? They seem to be interdependent but we're seeing
more and more emphasis on that user experience these days.
Theisinger: You need to bridge the gap between analytics and just data storage and
processing. So you have to present them in-state. This is what happens. It’s very
descriptive of what's going on, and we try to be a little bit more predictive when it comes
to the way we want to do analysis at YP. We're looking to go beyond just descriptive
analytics.
What has also changed is the platform by which you present the data. It's going highly
mobile. Small businesses need to be able to just pick up their mobile device and look at
the effectiveness of their campaigns with YP. They're able to do that through a mobile
platform we’ve built called YP for Merchants.
They can log in and see their metrics that are core to their business and how those
campaigns are performing. They can even see some details, like if they missed a phone
call and they want to be able to reach back out to a consumer and see if they need to help,
solve a problem, or provide a service.
Developer perspective
Gardner: And given that your developers had to go through the steps of creating that
great user experience and taking it to the mobile tier, was there anything about Vertica,
your warehouse, or your approach to analytics that made that development process
easier? Is there an approach to delivering this from a developer perspective that you think
others might learn from?
Theisinger: There is, and it takes a lot more people than just the analytics team in my
group or the engineers in my team. It’s a lot of other teams within YP that build this. But

5. first and foremost, people want to see the data as real time and as near real time as they
can.
When a small business relies on contact from customers, we track those calls. When a
potential customer calls a small business and that small business isn’t able to actually get
to the call or respond to that customer because maybe they are on a job, it's important to
know that that call happened recently. It's important for that small business to reach back
out to the consumer, because that consumer could go somewhere else and get that service
from a competitor.
To be able to do that as quickly as possible is a hard-and-fast requirement. So processing
the data as quickly as you can and presenting that, whether it be on a mobile device, in
this case, as quickly as you can is definitely paramount to making that a success.
Gardner: I've spoken to a number of people over the years and one of the takeaways I
get is that infrastructure is destiny. It really seems to be the case in your business that
having that core infrastructure decision process done correctly has now given you the
opportunity to scale up, be innovative, and react to the market. I think it’s also telling
that, in this data driven decade that we’ve been in for a few years now, the whole small
business sector of the economy is a huge part of our overall productivity and growth as an
economy.
Any thoughts, generally about making infrastructure decisions for the long run, decisions
you won't regret, decisions that that can scale over time and are future proof?
Theisinger: Yeah, for speaking about what I've seen through the job that we’ve had it
here at YP, we reach over half a million paying advertisers. The shift is happening
between just telling the advertisers what's happened to helping them actually drive new
business.
So it's around the fact that I know who my customers are now, how do I find more of
them, or how do I reach out to them, how do I market to them? That's where the real shift
is. You have to have a really strong scalable and extensible platform -- all the "bles," if
you will -- to be able to answer that question. Having the right infrastructure puts you in
the position to be able to do that. That’s where businesses are going to end up growing,
whether it's ours or small businesses.
And our success is hinged to whether or not we can get these small businesses to grow.
So we are definitely 100 percent focused on trying to make that happen.
Gardner: It’s also telling that you’ve been able to adjust so rapidly. Obviously, your
business has been around for a long time. People are very familiar with the Yellow Pages,
the actual physical product, but you've gone to make software so core to your value and
your differentiation. I'm impressed and I commend you on being able to make that
transitions fairly rapidly.

6. Core talent
Theisinger: Yeah, well thank you. We’ve invested a lot in the people within the
technology team we have there in Glendale. We've built our own internal search
capabilities, our own internal products. We’ve pulled a lot of good core talent from other
companies.
I used to work at Yahoo with other folks, and YP is definitely focused on trying to make
this transition a successful one, but we have our eye on our heritage. Over a hundred
years of being very successful in the print business is not something you want to turn
your back on. You want to be able to embrace that, and we’ve learned a lot from it too.
So we're right there with small businesses. We have a very large sales force, which is also
very powerful and helpful in making this transition a success. We've leaned on all of that
and we become one big kind of happy family, if you will. We all worked very closely
together to make this transition successful.
Hewlett Packard Enterprise
Vertica Community Edition
Start Your Free Trial Now
Gardner: Well, great, I am afraid we will have to leave it there. We've been learning
about how Yellow Pages, or YP, has experimented with and built out a full enterprise
data warehouse capability, built with also powerful near real-time reporting capabilities.
We've heard why pulling massive data and information from across new and legacy
sources is essential to be able to report precise metrics to YP’s advertisers and how that's
differentiating the company in the new world of online marketing and advertising.
So join me in extending a big thank you to out guest, Bill Theisinger, the Vice President
of Engineering for Platform Data Services at YP. Thank you, sir.
Theisinger: Thank you, Dana. I appreciate the time.
Gardner: And a big thank you also to our audience for joining us for this Big Data and
Information Governance Innovation case study discussion. I'm Dana Gardner, Principal
Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host for this ongoing series of HPE-sponsored
discussions. Thanks again for listening, and do come back next time.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Sponsor:
Hewlett Packard Enterprise.
Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how Yellow Pages help small businesses
attract, reach out to, and retain customers using big data. Copyright Interarbor
Solutions, LLC, 2005-2015. All rights reserved.

7. You may also be interested in:
• Redcentric Uses Advanced Configuration Database to Focus Massive Merger
Across Multiple Networks
• HP at Discover delivers the industry's first open, hybrid, ecosystem-wide cloud
architecture
• How Tableau Software and Big Data Come Together: Strong Visualization
Embedded on an Agile Analytics Engine
• Big Data Helps Conservation International Proactively Respond to Species Threat
in Tropical Forests
• How Globe Testing helps startups make the leap to cloud- and mobile-first
development
• GoodData analytics developers on what they look for in a big data platform
• ITIL-ITSM tagteam boosts Mexican ISP INFOTEC's operations quality
• Novel consumer retail behavior analysis from InfoScout relies on HP Vertica big
data chops
• IT Operations Modernization Helps Energy Powerhouse Exelon Acquire
Businesses
• ECommerce portal Avito uses big data to master rapid fraud detection
• How a Hackathon Approach Juices Innovation on Big Data Applications for
Thomson Reuters
• How Waste Management Builds a Powerful Services Contiunuum Across
Operations, Infrastructure, Development, and IT Processes
• GSN Games hits top prize using big data to uncover deep insights into gamer
preferences