Case Study: Acxiom achieves faster, more accurate big-data marketing and lower costs with Microsoft Azure

Marketing smarter by unlocking big data

Acxiom, a large marketing-analytics company, helps brands design highly targeted campaigns by mining massive consumer datasets. After 25 years on SAS, Acxiom hit performance and scalability limits and faced high licensing costs, while needing a platform that could handle much larger data volumes and attract R-skilled talent.

Acxiom moved to Microsoft’s analytics stack—SQL Server 2016 R Services and Microsoft R Server for Hadoop—while using Azure, Azure Data Lake, and HDInsight for experimentation and data exchange. The change let teams run in-database, parallel R analytics on Hadoop and Spark, deploy models from laptop to cluster with minimal changes, cut licensing costs, and build models about 30% faster; the result is more accurate targeting, higher customer revenue, easier global collaboration, and a path to a data marketplace.

Acxiom

Marty Rose

Principal Data Scientist