Luminar Extracts Insights with Hadoop

Luminar, a unit of Entravision Communications Corporation, is the first analytics and modeling provider that uniquely serves the U.S. Latino market. The company uses its proprietary technology to transform Latino consumer data into insights and business intelligence. Luminar unlocks big data and develops predictable models that reflect the behaviors and attitudes of today’s Latino customers across a wide range of vertical categories.

Typical market research studies involve three steps:
• Identify a target segment for the study
• Create a sample panel that matches that segment
• Study the sample panel and apply findings to programs for the entire population

Luminar did not want to take sample transaction from adult Latinos living in the United States; they wanted customer data on the entire population. And they did not want to store only some transactions from one or two sources; they wanted to acquire and save as many transactions as possible from as many different sources as possible. Luminar wanted to build models based on empirical insights, not sample insights.

With its data set consisting of nearly 15 million adult U.S. Latinos, Luminar was in a position to investigate some of its clients’ most challenging hypotheses about what those customers wanted. As Luminar’s data set grew in size and scope, the company was able to offer more reliable market research data. The Luminar IT team also needed a storage platform that could handle the size and complexity of the company’s growing data set.

Luminar set about building the largest U.S. Latino customer datastore it could obtain, with as many transactions as it could capture for adult U.S. Latinos. With its data set consisting of nearly 15 million adult U.S. Latinos, Luminar was in a position to investigate some of its clients' most challenging hypotheses about what customers wanted.

Luminar compared Hortonworks and other solutions for their ability to support their growing data workloads, without the risk of getting locked in with something that might limit them in the future. They appreciated the Hortonworks commitment to nurturing Hadoop in the open source community.

One of Luminar’s key reasons for choosing Hortonworks was Hortonworks Data Platform’s (HDP) interoperability with other pieces of their storage and business intelligence framework. HDP integrated easily with their data store and Amazon Cloud platform.