Egg plc, now a part of Yorkshire Building Society (egg.com) is the world’s largest online bank. It provides banking, insurance, investments, and mortgages to more than 3.6 million customers through its Internet site. In 1998, Egg selected Sun Microsystems to create a reliable, scalable, secure infrastructure to support its more than 2.5 million daily transactions. In 2001, the system was upgraded to eliminate latency problems. This new customer data warehouse (CDW) used Sun, Oracle, and SAS software products. The initial data warehouse had about 10 terabytes of data and used a 16-CPU server. The system provides near–real-time data access. It provides data warehouse and data mining services to internal users, and it provides a requisite set of customer data to the customers themselves. Hundreds of sales and marketing campaigns are constructed using near–real-time data (within several minutes). And better, the system enables faster decision making about specific customers and customer classes.

Questions for Discussion
1. Why kind of business is Egg plc in? What is the competitive landscape?
2. How did Egg plc use near–real-time data warehousing for competitive advantage?