Case Study: Cardlytics achieves massive scalability and 40–80x faster analytics with OpenText Vertica Analytics Platform

Vertica Analytics Platform grows with Cardlytics to accommodate large volumes of data and provide fast returns on queries

Cardlytics is an Atlanta-based purchase-intelligence company that delivers targeted offers through banks and financial partners (e.g., Bank of America, PNC). Rapid growth and each new partner caused data volumes to explode, exposing limits of their traditional RDBMS with slow query times (minutes to hours), nightly-only loads, and a need for a scalable, faster analytics architecture.

After a successful proof-of-concept, Cardlytics adopted the Vertica Analytics Platform and scaled from a 10TB/4-node setup to 250TB/30 nodes. The move delivered 40–80× faster queries (typical responses 0.5–1 minute), cut customer response time from a day to under an hour, increased weekly ingestion from 200 million to over 2 billion records, reduced operational overhead by ~90% (freeing staff for analytics), grew advertiser prospects tenfold (20→200/week), and paid for itself in about three months.

Cardlytics

Craig Snodgrass

Chief Strategy Officer