We’ve probably all heard the famous quote by John Wanamaker, the father of modern advertising: “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is, I don’t know which half.”
Wanamaker would love Apache Hadoop for retail applications, because it diminishes (or eliminates) the dilemma he described.
When Hadoop is integrated with modern retail operations, it dramatically reduces the cost of capturing, ingesting, storing and analyzing data.
Now Wanamaker wannabes can analyze enough data to make statistically confident observations on empirical retail data, rather than rolling the dice with customer panels, in-store surveys or focus groups to guess what drives sales.
The following reference architecture diagram represents a combination of approaches that we see our retail customers adopt, whether they sell automobiles, ladders, shirts or shoes.
via Modern Retail Architectures Built with Hadoop | Hortonworks.
