Customer Spotlight - Activant

Activant and Kickfire: The Best of Both Worlds

About Activant
Based in Livermore, California, Activant Solutions Inc. is a leading provider of business management solutions dedicated to serving small and medium-sized distributors and specialty retailers. Activant provides their customers with industry-specific software, professional services, content, supply chain connectivity, and analytics, focusing on the automotive aftermarket, heavy-duty truck, hardware and home centers, office products, and pharmacy retail industries. The company generates over $400M in revenues and has over 30,000 customer locations that use its solutions to manage their day-to-day operations.

The Need for Analytics
Activant's most popular product, Eagle, is an ERP solution for distributors and specialty retailers. As these customers use more and more of Eagle's functionality, they also look for better insight into their ERP information. Activant provides the standard operational reports that enable Eagle customers to manage their day-to-day operations but many of their most sophisticated customers need to be able to do create more complex and demanding queries and reports. For example, many of Activant's customers are retailers who need to be able to better understand the affects of seasonality on their customers' purchases in order to be able to better forecast inventory levels.

The Challenge with the Current Analytics Solution
Recognizing their customers' need for broader and deeper analytics capabilities, Activant introduced a new product that could perform complex analysis of the transactional data in the ERP system. Activant based this new product on MySQL, the de facto database standard for embedded applications. MySQL proved ideal in terms of cost effectiveness and ease of use but presented some serious scalability challenges, particularly for Activant's larger customers.

The Kickfire Solution
To meet the need for a scalable, embedded analytics solution, Activant started looking for MySQL reporting options and discovered the newly launched Kickfire analytics appliance. Activant was one of the first companies to take delivery of a Kickfire appliance and to exhaustively test it against a live workload. The results were impressive as Bill Wilson, SVP, Product Development observed:

"We started evaluating Kickfire because of the excellent price/performance they deliver for MySQL which we use extensively. After the initial tests showed performance improvements of over a hundred times for some of our most complex analytical queries, we decided to purchase our first system."

Kickfire is able to deliver these performance gains due to its unique architecture which is based on Kickfire's SQL chip - a chip that understands SQL instructions and packs the power of tens of general purpose CPUs onto a single chip. This chip, combined with Kickfire's column store database, advanced compression and automated indexing, deliver high performance at the lowest possible cost. In fact, when tested by the independent Transaction Processing Council (TPC), the Kickfire appliance delivered the world's number one price/performance for both 100 and 300GB data marts.

As well as blazing performance, Kickfire delivered two other important benefits to Activant:

• Fast Time to Value. Because Kickfire is delivered as a plug-and-play appliance, it is up and running in 15 minutes. For vendors like Activant who are focused on delivering turnkey business solutions to their customers, the ability to get a new module or solution component into production as quickly as possible with no configuration or complex setup and management is a key benefit .
• Runs MySQL Enterprise™. Kickfire is architected as a MySQL plug-in storage engine, meaning that existing MySQL based applications will run out of the box on Kickfire with 10-1000X performance improvements. This minimized the engineering effort required for Activant, thereby preserving precious development resources for other important roadmap deliverables.

Kickfire and Activant: the Best of both Worlds
With Kickfire, Activant has seen dramatic performance improvements of up to 719X over their previous system performance levels. Additionally, Kickfire's highly efficient data compression algorithms will enable their customers to store as much as ten times the amount of information as their previous standard configuration. Put simply, Kickfire enables Activant to deliver more performance and more scalability to the Eagle customers with less hardware and no migration headaches – now surely that is the best of both worlds?