Harte Hanks Wins Best in Big Data Award

BOSTON, MA--(Marketwired - Oct 14, 2014) - Harte Hanks (NYSE: HHS), a leading marketing organization that partners with top brands to establish deeper relationships with its customers and prospects, has won the Ventana Research 2014 Technology Leadership Award in the category of Big Data for its work with Splice Machine, the only Hadoop RDBMS. This award recognizes Harte Hanks as a technology leader for enabling their clients to create smarter customer interactions and better and faster customized brand experiences for their customers based on data and analytics.

Long known for their unique combination of know-how and consistent execution, Harte Hanks is focused on partnering with clients to create value for their brands across all inbound and outbound channels. Marketers often require insights from a variety of online and offline data sources and existing solutions aren't always flexible or efficient enough for emerging data analytics needs. They can require large investments in additional skills and software. However, Harte Hanks, working together with Splice Machine, has been able to boost query performance 5-10X, enabling clients to make marketing decisions needed to deliver high impact customer interactions faster and requiring fewer computing resources.

"Marketers know that more data needs to be considered in marketing decisions to enable higher value customer interactions and drive marketing performance," according to Rob Fuller, Managing Director, Product Innovation Center, Harte Hanks. "The challenge is that current approaches to leveraging data in decisions are slow and very expensive to scale -- and there is no going back once investments in scale are made. We are innovating to enable the experimentation and scaling needs today's marketers require -- providing flexible scaling and improving performance."

In the world of omni-channel marketing, the real-time marketing decisions that provide positive customer experiences require scalability to handle huge spikes in data. Harte Hanks together with Splice Machine can improve performance and enable easier and more linear scaling for clients without requiring them to retrain or increase staff, build new skills or buy costly complex tools, or invest in costly infrastructure improvements.

Working from an existing stack of tools such as Unica and Cognos, along with analysts accessing data via SQL, Tableau, and SAS, radically changes the technical infrastructure from expensive Oracle-based databases running over a SAN (Storage Area Network), to a Hadoop-based database distributed across clusters of commodity servers. Hadoop replaces the existing SAN infrastructure, and Splice Machine replaces Oracle RDBMSs to realize these performance gains.

Harte Hanks will accept the award at the conclusion of the Ventana Research Summit in Burlingame, Calif. on October 22, 2014. The award, presented annually, identifies business and IT leaders who are using technologies and applying best practices to provide the best possible outcomes in productivity, performance and support of an organization's goals and objectives. In this case, Harte Hanks is helping clients make more strategic marketing decisions based on data that adds value to their brands.

To learn more, visit the redesigned Harte Hanks website at www.hartehanks.com

About Harte Hanks

Harte Hanks (NYSE: HHS) is one of the world's leading, insight-driven multi-channel marketing organizations, delivering impactful business results for some of the world's best-known brands. Through strategic agencies and our core marketing services, we develop integrated solutions that connect brands with prospects and customers, moving them beyond awareness to transactions and brand loyalty. Visit the Harte Hanks website at www.hartehanks.com or call (800) 456-9748.

As used herein, "Harte Hanks" refers to Harte-Hanks, Inc. and/or its applicable operating subsidiaries, as the context may require. Harte Hanks' logo and name are trademarks owned by Harte Hanks. All other brand names, product names, or trademarks belong to their respective owners.