In the News

MetLife Uses NoSQL For Customer Service Breakthrough

Just about every company with the combination of lots of customers and lots of points of customer interaction aspires to build the proverbial 360-degree customer view. All too many fail, with disparate systems and data being the usual culprit in failed attempts to gain a consolidated customer view.

Developing an integrated customer view has been on the wish list at insurance giant MetLife for at least 10 years, but it recently took a fresh approach to the challenge by choosing a NoSQL database as the platform for bringing together data from more than 70 separate administrative systems, claims systems and other data sources. It moved from pilot to rollout in 90 days -- breakneck speed in an industry used to measuring IT projects in months and years.

"We had 60 different teams working together as one group, and they were working nights and weekends not because they had to but because they were excited and wanted to," says Gary Hoberman, MetLife's senior VP and CIO of regional application development.

The choice of NoSQL for the project makes sense because these databases can ingest structured, semi-structured and unstructured information without requiring tedious, expensive and time-consuming database-mapping or extract, transform and load (ETL) processes to normalize all data to a rigid schema, as required by relational databases.

10gen Introduces Incremental Backup Service For MongoDB

10gen recently announced limited release of their MongoDB Backup Service providing incremental backups and point-in-time recovery.For backing up or restoring MongoDB, you would usually use mongodump and mongorestore utilities. Optionally you can also use --oplog to get a point-in-time snapshot. However backing up the entire database every time can start consuming more time and disk space. This is where the new service introduced by 10gen comes in – by providing a continuous incremental backup which allows for point-in-time restore. Also being a cloud-based backup service, users can pay for what they need without having to plan up-front for storage capacity.

The promise of better data has MetLife investing $300M in new tech

MetLife is building new products on new technologies thanks to a $300 million investment in new technology and new skills. One of the first products is a MongoDB-based app that puts all of customers’ information in one place

The insurance industry hasn’t always been a beacon of technological innovation. Then again, its major providers haven’t always earmarked $300 million for investments in new technology and new talent like MetLife has. The strategy has already borne its first fruit in the form of a new database system and application that lets the company see everything it knows about a customer in a single place.


How big an undertaking was it? Built atop MongoDB, The Wall brings together data from more than 70 legacy systems and merges it into a single record. It runs across six servers in two data centers and presently stores about 24 terabytes of data. That includes MetLife’s entire U.S. customer base (some 45 million agreements in total), although the goal is to expand it to international customers and multiple languages, as well, and maybe even create a customer-facing version. It updates in near real time, just like the Facebook wall, as new customer data is entered.

Building a production database system on NoSQL technology isn’t commonplace in insurance or other large industries, but it was about the only way to pull this off. Going with the relational model, Hoberman explained, would have meant figuring out a common set of schema across such a wide range of products (insurance products and terms vary from state to state and country to country) that it would have been nearly impossible to actually achieve that coveted 360-degree customer view. MongoDB let Hoberman’s team build some light schema to give the app order, but to be able to take in all the data it had available.

Ericsson uses Jaspersoft for Big Data analytics on MongoDB

Ericsson has improved its Ericsson Multiscreen TV Solution, which allows TV service providers to easily monitor and manage delivery of content to virtually any type of consumer entertainment device from a central location, with the help of open source technology.

Ericsson built the Multiscreen TV Solution specifically to help TV service providers reduce costs and open new revenue streams. The solution includes built-in reports covering operations and marketing.

On the operational side data is supplied on usage and the health of the TV system being used, and with marketing there is data on the content customers are browsing and consuming, in order to support decisions about offerings and to calculate royalties.

NYC Needs More Iconic Companies, Fewer Early Exits, VC Says

Bill Gurley, partner at Benchmark Capital, leveled a number of serious charges at a ballroom full of New Yorkers this week–the city has yet to produce an iconic venture-backed company, he said. And, he added, people here are more likely to sell early rather than create a true home-run for a venture firm via an IPO.


But DoubleClick co-founder Dwight Merriman disagreed when he heard of Gurley’s assessment of the New York startup scene.

“I think there’s a bias against early exits [in New York],” said Merriman on the sidelines of the conference. Merriman has co-founded three currently private companies based in New York: 10gen, Gilt Groupe and Business Insider. None of these are considering early exits, even though they could be sold, he said.

“I don’t see [early exits] happening” in New York, any more than in Silicon Valley, said Merriman.

Merriman added that several New York companies over the past 12 months raised late-stage venture financings that valued them at more than $500 million, probably as many as there were in Silicon Valley. Besides his own startups, Merriman counted venture-backed New York companies like Tumblr, AppNexus, ZocDoc and Foursquare as those with highest value.

The New York startup and venture scene is growing quickly, he said, and it’s still pretty young, so he isn’t surprised major IPOs haven’t happened yet.

10gen, for its part, has more employees, including engineers, in its New York office than in Palo Alto, Calif., said Merriman.

10Gen Introduces MongoDB Backup Service

This may just be a Big Data first. 10Gen, the MongoDB company, is introducing MongoDB Backup Service, a cloud-based solution geared toward its customers who use large data sets.

“It is engineered specifically for MongoDB,” says Kelly Stirman, 10gen’s director of product marketing. He adds that it provides a reliable and convenient way to backup and restore the NoSQL database his company supports.

Not only that, but it also includes features like Data Security, High Availability, Point-in-Time Restore, Sharded Cluster Support and more. Its pricing is attractive because you pay only for what you use, so there’s no need to stress about whether you’ll run out of room and have to overpay for extra or whether you’re wasting money because you’ve overestimated. Add to that that there’s no need to call anyone or write-up purchase orders when you want to buy; you simply charge it to your credit card.

MongoDB gets incremental restores ... for a price

MongoDB steward 10Gen is trying to squeeze money out of heavy users of the open source NoSQL database, and has set aside almost a petabyte of raw storage to deal with initial demand for a new backup-and-restore service.

Like other companies that shepherd an open source product (Canonical – Ubuntu, Basho – Riak, et cetera), 10Gen has to walk a fine line between introducing features that enterprise users want, while not alienating standard developers of the free version who may feel left out.

The MongoDB Backup Solution, announced Tuesday, is an attempt by the company to walk this tightrope. The technology provides a way of incrementally backing up the database, where previously it was only possible to do full backups and restores via the native mongodump and mongorestore utilities.

10gen introduces a backup option for MongoDB

There’s no question that MongoDB is popular among developers. 10gen, the company behind the NoSQL database, has been building out its executive team. Now 10gen is adding a support mechanism that could give users some assurance that they won’t lose their data in the event of a disaster.

The MongoDB Backup Service, now in limited release with general release slated for the summer, lets customers determine how often they want to back up their databases at colocation facilities 10gen uses. If a user wants to back up every six hours, for example, then that user has many options to choose from in the way of restoring a database to a previous state. They can choose the version from six, 12, 18 or 24 hours ago. Restores require two-factor authentication and work across multiple shards. Customers pay only for the amount of backup that they use.

Chicago CIO Pursues Predictive Analytics Strategy

Alongside big-city problems like lowering the murder rate, cutting the number of stolen garbage carts may seem like small stakes. But lost garbage carts actually cost Chicago a lot of money and time -- it takes scarce resources to field the complaints, acquire new carts and pay staff to deliver them. What if data analysis could help the city minimize the number of lost carts?

Evaluating garbage cart losses with mapping software and comparing that information to streetlight failures, city staff confirmed what they had suspected: In certain neighborhoods, if the alley lights go down, garbage cart thefts spike. That intelligence gives a new sense of urgency to getting lights repaired.

"Government has been very good at collecting data, but not as good at using the data," says Brett Goldstein, the city of Chicago's CIO. So Chicago is in the process of building a predictive analytics platform that will do more analysis and much more sophisticated analysis. That work is being funded in part through a $1 million grant the city received in March as a runner-up in Bloomberg Philanthropies' Mayors Challenge, a competition to fund innovative ideas in city government.

The city still has far to go in completing the predictive platform. Goldstein has spent the past two years laying a foundation for this analytics work, including hiring experts from the private sector and academia with experience in big data and open source. His team has also created a single database on the MongoDB open source platform, into which data is fed from dozens of legacy IT systems, providing better visibility into municipal operations across departments.

5 Big Wishes For Big Data Deployments

Big Data's Missing Ingredients

If you've even experimented with building big-data applications or analyses, you're probably acutely aware that the domain has its share of missing ingredients. We've boiled it down to five top wants on the big-data wish list, starting with SQL (or at least SQL-like) analysis options and shortcuts to deployment and advanced analytics and finishing with real-time and network analysis options.

The good news is that people and, in some cases, entire communities, are working on these problems. There are armies of data-management and data-analysis professionals who are familiar with SQL, for example, so organizations naturally want to take advantage of knowledge of that query language to make sense of data in Hadoop clusters and NoSQL databases -- the latter is no paradox, as the "No" in "NoSQL" stands for "not only" SQL. It's not a surprise that every distributor of Apache Hadoop software has proposed, is testing, and has or will soon release an option for SQL or SQL-like analysis of data residing on Hadoop clusters. That group includes Cloudera, EMC, Hortonworks, IBM, MapR and Teradata, among others. In the NoSQL camp, 10gen has improved on the analytics capabilities within MongoDB, and commercial vendor Acunu does the same for Cassandra.

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