“With SQL Server 2012 and xVelocity, new ideas can be validated on the same day rather than waiting weeks or even months. This means that we can respond more quickly to changing markets.”

Duane McLeod, Senior Architect, Business Intelligence, BNZ

BNZ wants faster, more flexible access to customer and transaction data so that it can respond more quickly to market conditions. The bank’s business intelligence (BI) specialists often need up to a week to satisfy a data request, but its analysts say that’s far too slow. So BNZ has turned to Microsoft for BI tools that will let the analysts run reports themselves, giving them the fast data results they need.

Business NeedsAs one of the biggest banking corporations in New Zealand, BNZ is a heavy consumer of data. Whenever BNZ develops a new product or plans a marketing campaign, the bank’s customer insight, risk, and finance analysts dig into its customer and transaction data to decide how to tailor the product or campaign to fit market conditions and to assess any risks. The faster the analysts can do their work, the faster the bank can craft an offering, enter the market, and get a return on its efforts.

BNZ analysts have been using a mix of products for their business intelligence efforts—including SAS and SAP BusinessObjects as well as Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 data management software. Each product is useful, but none of them allows the nontechnical analysts to explore large data sets and create new views of the data, or to incorporate data that isn’t already in the data warehouse. Instead, the analysts—who are the power users of the bank’s data warehouse—must ask the bank’s BI team to create a new view whenever the analysts want to look at the data in new ways.

This process drastically slows the analysts’ work and impedes the bank’s ability to respond to market conditions. Duane McLeod, Senior Architect of Business

Intelligence at BNZ, explains the problem: “Every time that our analysts want a view of the data, they have to request it from the BI team and wait for the view to be created. When the users see the view they requested, they have more questions, so they come back to BI with a new request, and BI says, ’’OK, we’ll sort that out over the next few days.” When the analysts get the new data view, they often have even more questions. “So it might take them several weeks before they get all the answers they want because they’ve had to engage the BI team every single time,” says McLeod.

SolutionIn August 2011, BNZ decided to become an early adopter of Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Enterprise. Rollout began in March 2012 to a set of the company’s financial analysts. Depending on their feedback, the solution will be rolled out to other departments throughout 2012. It is being deployed on an HP ProLiant BL460 server computer.

BNZ wanted to upgrade because its BI team was happy with the success of their earlier adoption of SQL Server 2008 R2. The main reason BNZ chose SQL Server 2012 Enterprise for its new data management solution was its potential to create a self-service data analysis tool. Dave Thompson, Head of Business

Customer: BNZWebsite: www.bnz.co.nzCustomer Size: 5,000 employeesCountry or Region: New ZealandIndustry: Financial services—Banking

Customer ProfileHeadquartered in the city of Auckland, BNZ provides a broad range of banking and financial products to retail, business, agribusiness, corporate, and institutional clients.

Solution Spotlight Runs data queries 60 times faster. Can cut requests for BI specialist work

in half. Avoids weeks of delay in receiving

reports, resulting in faster response to market conditions.

Can validate new ideas the same day instead of waiting weeks or months.

For more information about other Microsoft customer successes, please visit:www.microsoft.com/casestudies

Microsoft SQL ServerCustomer Solution Case Study

New Zealand Bank Gets to Market Faster with Self-Service Business Intelligence

Intelligence at BNZ, says, “Self-service is high on our agenda, and so far SQL Server 2012 looks like it will deliver on this front.” Eventually, this tool could be used by up to 200 people—nontechnical employees as well as power users.

At the heart of the new solution is the SQL Server 2012 xVelocity in-memory analytics engine. xVelocity gives Microsoft Excel 2010 spreadsheet clients and other reporting tools fast access to data in SQL Server 2012 Analysis Services tabular models. These in-memory databases can import data from multiple sources—including sources outside the data warehouse—and in multiple formats, including relational databases, data feeds, and flat text files. Once imported, data can be enriched by adding calculated columns, relationships, key performance indicators, and hierarchies. “With xVelocity, we can grab millions of rows from the data warehouse, bring in large external data sets, combine everything in a tabular model, and analyze it—all in a matter of hours,” McLeod says. “That’s something we haven’t been able to do before.”

Other key technologies in the solution are the SQL Server 2012 Business Intelligence Semantic Model and the xVelocity memory-optimized columnstore index, which compress data and dramatically increase data processing speeds for common data warehouse queries.

Tests in early 2012 directly compared query speeds for the xVelocity columnstore index running on SQL Server 2012 versus star schemas running on SQL Server 2008 R2. Overall, queries on fact tables with xVelocity columnstore indexes ran 6 to 80 times faster than standard B-tree index-optimized queries, and CPU consumption time was reduced by 8 to 50 times when columnstore indexes were used.

BenefitsWhen fully implemented, the new solution will reduce analysts’ reliance on the BI team, improve their insights, and help BNZ respond more quickly to the market. Powerful Self ServiceEarly tests indicate that SQL Server 2012 processes BNZ data queries 60 times faster than SQL Server 2008 R2. Giving analysts the ability to run their own queries accelerates the process even more. Analysts

can now manipulate large data sets themselves without having to continually request the internal BI team to deliver new extracts, new feeds to the data warehouse, reports, or changes to existing reporting structures. McLeod says, “The major advantage for us is that it empowers our analysts to get the data they want without being dependent on the BI team. The team provides solutions to 80 BI requests every week. This solution has the potential to cut that amount in half.”

Higher-Quality InsightsSelf-service BI increases the bank’s ability to assess risks and opportunities by letting analysts spend their energy answering their own questions as they occur. This helps improve the quality of insights drawn from the data. “Employees spend less time thinking about exactly what data they want, completing data requests, and waiting for the BI team to respond,” says McLeod. “Instead, they can spend more time validating their ideas and strategies by querying the massive volumes of data, without having to rely on the BI team.”

Faster Response to the MarketSelf-service BI and faster data processing help BNZ respond more quickly to market conditions. “With SQL Server 2012 and xVelocity, new ideas can be validated on the same day rather than waiting weeks or even months,” McLeod says. “This means that we can respond more quickly to changing markets, and unsuccessful campaigns can be pulled quickly without further expenditure. It also ensures that the bank is always dealing with the right group of customers when marketing specific products or packages.”

This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.

Document published March 2012

Software and Services Microsoft Server Product Portfolio− Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Enterprise

Microsoft Office− Microsoft Excel 2010

Technologies− Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Analysis

Services

Hardware− HP ProLiant BL460 server computer