Lastminute.com stocks up data warehouse

Online leisure site Lastminute.com has built a new data warehouse to aid its delivery of offers to up to 30,000 customers at once.

Lastminute needs to collect data from 15,000 suppliers to present the most accurate information to customers on its 12 global websites.

The dotcom has invested in data warehousing technology from Informatica that allows it to pull data from its own transactional systems and its suppliers. The data is then used to populate a data warehouse, which is used to track purchases and analyse the effectiveness of promotions.

To get the best offers in front of its customers, Lastminute needs to be able to track its products across the globe, adjusting its prices and making changes to its inventory "as close to real time as possible", said Chip Steinmetz, chief technology officer at Lastminute.com.

"This is a volatile market we deal in. Things can change in a heartbeat," he added.

Lastminute.com estimates it receives 500,000 unique visitors each day. At any one time, 30,000 simultaneous transactions may be running.

The task of gathering and analysing its data has been made more complex, with information residing in different disparate systems, as the business has bought firms such as Travelselect.

The decision to buy PowerCenter, Informatica's data integration engine, was made last December. The first parts of the data warehouse began going live in the first half of this year.

But the complexity should not be underestimated, warned Steinmetz. He said the project had taken "about three times as long" as had been expected.

"And it will never be completed. We're impelled to add new products, make sure we win market share, and so it continues to grow," he said.