USA Today Publisher Gannett Uses Qubole to Drive Business Value from Big Data

SANTA CLARA, Calif., Jan. 29, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Qubole, the data activation company, today announced that Gannett, the country’s largest newspaper publisher, uses Qubole to efficiently optimize and analyze hundreds of terabytes of data each day. By harnessing the power of big data with Qubole‘s Presto engine, Gannett is able to consolidate log-level data from hundreds of customers into one scalable data lake, and query an entire day’s worth of data – about 70 million records across 300 dimensions – in seconds.

Gannett is a media and marketing solutions conglomerate with annual revenue of more than $3 billion. The company produces more than 300 digital, mobile, and print publications across the US and UK, including its flagship publication and America’s top daily newspaper, USA Today. After more than 100 years of growth, the company ran into a problem felt by businesses everywhere: what to do with the massive stores of data derived from digital operations, and how to store that data in a useful way.

“Our number one reason for choosing Qubole was to take advantage of cloud economics: only pay for what you use,” said Oskar Austegard, Gannett’s senior director of Data Solutions. “Qubole’s [workload-aware] autoscaling and [aggressive] downscaling is definitely a huge cost saver, and the ability to isolate workloads to separate clusters is key to efficient operations. With our data operationalized, we are now looking at how to use our first party data and the insights derived from that data to improve the experience of both our B2C and B2B customers.”

Gannett transitioned to Qubole in early 2016, after finding it impossible to cost-effectively balance the needs of storage and compute resources with other vendors. With Qubole, Gannett has drastically increased the amount of data it processes in addition to a number of other benefits including:

• Increased volume and processing power — In just two years with Qubole and Presto, Gannett has processed seven-times more data, from 100 to 700 terabytes, without the need for additional administrative support. They also moved from hosting four computing clusters to around 25 and from having fewer than 10 data analysts to 40 users today. With no limits imposed by the cloud platform on the compute capacity, Qubole has given Gannett the freedom to take on any extra large-scale processing required, without impacting its normal operations.
• Faster data discovery and integration — With Qubole and Presto, Gannett analysts can query tens of millions of records in seconds, allowing the publisher to introduce standardized reports across the organization and move to an environment of self-service reporting.
• Improved customer retention via marketing optimization — Qubole helps Gannett build data models that identify customers’ lifetime value and predict, say, those who may be about to quit their subscription, to take preventive action. The company can now make better content recommendations and, in particular, analyze in detail which micro-segments of the population respond to adverts from its B2B customers.
• Cost savings — With Qubole, Gannett pays only for the processing power they are using at a given moment, allowing them to scale massively with just a two-fold cost increase. Qubole’s Intelligent Spot Management and Workload-Aware Autoscaling features have enabled Gannett to cost-effectively manage its large data sets and ‘bursty’ data workloads.
• Ability to scale — With Qubole, Gannett stores their data in a single, flexible lake residing on AWS S3, while their computing “platform” is composed of EC2 instances that can be elastically scaled as needed.

“Today’s enterprises often lack the resources they need to gain actionable insights from the wealth of data they hold,” said Qubole CEO Ashish Thusoo. “Qubole’s platform gives Gannett, and all our customers, the ability to quickly structure and analyze their data and glean insights they would otherwise miss, saving time, money, and manpower.”

Learn more about how Gannett uses Qubole here: Qubole-Gannett Case Study

About Qubole
Qubole is revolutionizing the way companies activate their data--the process of putting data into active use across their organizations. With Qubole's cloud-native Data Platform for analytics and machine learning, companies exponentially activate petabytes of data faster, for everyone and any use case, while continuously lowering costs. Qubole overcomes the challenges of expanding users, use cases, and variety and volume of data while constrained by limited budgets and a global shortage of big data skills. Qubole's intelligent automation and self-service supercharge productivity, while workload-aware auto-scaling and real-time spot buying drive down compute costs dramatically. Qubole offers the only platform that delivers freedom of choice, eliminating legacy lock in--use any engine, any tool, and any cloud to match your company's needs. Qubole investors include CRV, Harmony Partners, IVP, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Norwest Venture Partners, and Singtel Innov8. For more information visit us online.

About Gannett
Gannett Co., Inc. (NYSE: GCI) is an innovative, digitally focused media and marketing solutions company committed to strengthening communities across our network. With an unmatched local-to-national reach, Gannett touches the lives of more than 125 million people monthly with our Pulitzer-Prize winning content, consumer experiences and benefits, and advertiser products and services. Gannett brands include USA TODAY NETWORK with the iconic USA TODAY and more than 100 local media brands, digital marketing services companies ReachLocal, WordStream and SweetIQ, and U.K. media company Newsquest. To connect with us, visit www.gannett.com.