HW #5

The article that I decided to choose this week was about Kelly Blue book and how they are expanding to help give buyers and sellers a better idea on prices that they should either be selling or buying a car for. Anyone how has tried to sell a car has probably visited the Kelly Blue Book web site in order to get an idea of how much they should be selling their car for because most people have no idea what their car is worth. Kelly Blue Book (KBB) makes it possible with just a couple of simple questions about you car and what options it has to offer. “Until recently, the numbers were largely educated conjectures that Kelley analysts arrived at by running a handful of car sales and other metrics through a rudimentary pricing algorithm.”

            Now the technology that they are using doesn’t just crunch the numbers so to say, they are using many different forms of data such as the location in which the car is being bought and sold. But with the new data that they are using to give their users a more accurate price they have had to ditch their old system and start using another data analyzer, “the company started using a new IBM Netezza Twinfin data warehousing appliance.” This has now allowed Kelly Blue Book to be transformed into a completely analytics-driven operation, said Shawn Hushman, Kelley's vice president of enterprise analytics.

            With the changes that the company has decided to go with in the last several years has paid off for them because they are now reaching much more accurate prices for the users of their web site. “Kelley used to update car values once every five months, but it now updates values every week for more than 20,000 vehicles. "We could do it on a daily basis if we wanted to."