Case Study: Criteo achieves a Big Data Center of Excellence and real-time ad optimization with Vertica

How to build a Big Data center of excellence with Vertica

Criteo, a Paris-based performance‑marketing technology company that processes tens of billions of events and serves billions of ads daily, faced slow query performance and limited reporting from its Hadoop-only analytics stack. To scale analytics into a business driver, Criteo formalized a Big Data center of excellence to define and spread best practices and better align analytics with business and customer outcomes.

Criteo layered Vertica on top of Hadoop and used the CoE to standardize workflows and tuning, improving query performance and enabling real-time, per-user ad optimization across mobile, apps, and desktop. The deployment now runs a 75 TB Vertica cluster on 50 CPU‑heavy nodes, delivers deeper insights across massive data volumes, speeds query-specific tuning, and supports the company’s continued double‑digit growth.

Criteo