NextAction(r) Corporation Enables Seamless Scaling of Co-operative Customer Data Warehouse with Oracle(r) Database 10g

Direct Marketer’s Migration to Oracle Enables Company to Increase Performance, Consolidate Databases and Hardware Servers to Single, Highly Available System

REDWOOD SHORES, Calif. 03-MAY-2006 To better serve its customer base of 1,000-plus of the nation’s leading catalog, Internet and multi-channel retailers, NextAction(r) Corporation, the fastest growing and leading provider of co-operative data solutions for retailers who want to identify new, relevant and lucrative market segments online, offline and everything in between, migrated to Oracle(r) Database 10g to power its seven terabyte (and growing) co-operative behavioral marketing data warehouse.

NextAction’s data warehouse continuously captures customer and transaction data from its clients. After analyzing this collective data, NextAction produces targeted lists of the most profitable group of next customers with a proven affinity to tailored offers for its clients consisting of up to hundreds of thousands of records. NextAction’s clients often use these lists, built by leveraging product-level data, proprietary statistical models, algorithms, technology, and demographic data to help hone their offers as well as identify new and emerging consumer markets that would be receptive to relevant, targeted offers.

Following a thorough evaluation of data management software and hardware platforms, NextAction migrated its core data warehouse system from another vendor’s database to an Oracle on Linux solution. Specifically, NextAction deployed Oracle Database 10g, Oracle Data Guard, Oracle Partitioning, and Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g on a HP DL 585 server with four AMD Opteron(tm) processors running Novell SuSe Linux.

NextAction’s move to Oracle delivered immediate and tangible results. The company consolidated its data warehouse system down to a single Oracle Database instance on a single hardware server with four processors from eight database instances powered by four hardware servers with four processors apiece. Not only was the size of NextAction’s data warehouse system reduced, but it also condensed the amount of data in its data warehouse. Prior to its migration, NextAction’s data warehouse stood at 30 terabyte (TB). Once the Oracle system went into production in June 2005, the data warehouse measured five TB due to Oracle Database 10g’s efficient and powerful data storage capabilities as well as NextAction’s re-write of their data warehouse application.

NextAction’s data warehouse powered by Oracle also enabled delivery of increased performance results. In one example, NextAction’s new system reduced a query from four-and-a-half hours down to eight minutes. Prior to running Oracle, some of NextAction’s queries would take days to process -- waiting in queue until the system was capable of processing the queries. The improved system performance has enabled NextAction’s account management staff to better serve its clients and deliver critical information in minutes or hours rather than days.

Prior to its move to Oracle, NextAction’s management of its data warehouse was limited. Its database administrators now rely on Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g, along with a third party tool, to manage and monitor its data warehouse, applications and related systems effectively. NextAction’s use of Oracle Partitioning has also had a tremendous impact on its ability to more efficiently manage the data within its database. NextAction runs 1,000 physical partitions -- a partition for each of its clients. Oracle Partitioning enhances the manageability, security, performance, and availability of a wide variety of applications by allowing tables, indexes, and index-organized tables to be subdivided into smaller pieces, enabling these database objects to be managed and accessed at a finer level of granularity. By using Oracle Partitioning to break down its customer data into specific ranges such as name, date or region, NextAction fulfills customers’ reports and marketing list requests in a more timely fashion by easily and precisely accessing the necessary customer data.

“Prior to our migration to Oracle, we were in a position of having to add more databases and hardware as fast as we could just to keep up,” said Steve Helle, Chief Technology Officer, NextAction Corporation. “The volume of data was such that our previous database would become unresponsive. We’re still growing at a tremendous rate, and with Oracle we’ve improved our ability to manage the amount of data we’re processing on a daily basis without taxing our systems or constantly having to expand them.”

About NextAction Corporation
NextAction(r) Corporation (www.nextaction.net) is the fastest growing and leading provider of co-operative data solutions for retailers who want to identify new, relevant and lucrative market segments offline, online and everything in between.

Over 1,000 member companies leverage the most robust, comprehensive product-level database solutions to accurately target the most profitable group of next customers with a proven affinity to tailored offers.

NextAction empowers retailers to engage across a host of different media to connect with today’s mobile, sophisticated and busy consumers by increasing the relevance and convenience of products and services offered to new and emerging market segments.

NextAction integrates product-level marketing data for over 100 million households and applies proprietary statistical models, algorithms and technology combined with demographic data to serve the marketing needs of the nation’s leading catalog, internet and multi-channel retailers.

About Oracle
Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL) is the world’s largest enterprise software company. For more information about Oracle, visit our Web site at http://www.oracle.com.

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Eloy Ontiveros

Oracle Corporation

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