Case Study
FICO
Disrupting the Analytics Market
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Company: FICO
Industry: Software and Services Provider
Location: San Jose, California
Employees: 3,000 Employees
Case Study
FICO
Summary
FICO seizes a billion dollar plus business opportunity and brings analytics to
the masses with the FICO Analytic Cloud
“We’ve achieved a remarkable business
transformation that fundamentally advances the
availability of predictive analytics.”
— Michael Trkay
Vice President of Cloud Services, FICO
Challenges
Solutions
Results
• Transform the FICO analytics
delivery model from prepackaged
software to cloud
• Deployed Red Hat OpenStack
on Cisco Unified Computing
System™ (Cisco UCS®) and
Cisco Nexus® switches
• Reduces time to value (TtV) for analytics
solutions by up to 70 percent
• Used Red Hat OpenShift to
provide private platform-asa-service (PaaS) access to
decision management platform
• Positions FICO to serve more
customers and industries
• Allow customers to build and sell
their own analytics solutions
• Expand revenue opportunities
by diversifying customer base
© 2016 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
• Brings the power of big data
and analytics to customers
Case Study
FICO
Challenges
FICO has pioneered analytics that drive decisions for 60 years. The
company is perhaps best known for one analytic product, the FICO
Score, which has become the standard measure of U.S. consumer
credit risk and is used in more than 10 billion credit decisions a
year. FICO also offers a host of analytic software solutions to major
corporations, helping them to predict a whole range of consumer
behaviors. Although FICO dominates these markets, growth
opportunities lie downstream.
“It’s a new economy, and software delivery models are changing,” says
Mike Trkay, vice president of Cloud Services. “We wanted to capitalize
on what we see as a billion-dollar-plus opportunity by reaching more
customers via a cloud delivery model.”
Transitioning from on-premises software to a hybrid delivery channel
has the potential to transform FICO’s business. With the FICO Analytic
Cloud, the company can serve organizations of all sizes, allowing
customers to create, customize, deploy, and even sell analytic
applications and services through the FICO Decision Management Suite
and FICO Analytic Cloud Marketplace.
“We needed scalable, elastic infrastructure to support our OpenStack
private cloud and Platform-as-a-Service goals,” says Trkay. “Instead of
using white-box servers, we looked to our partners, Cisco and Red Hat,
for an integrated, supported solution.”
© 2016 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Case Study
FICO
Cisco UCS and Cisco Nexus switches support a one-stop shop for analytics in the cloud.
Solutions
Speeding time to value for customers
With the FICO Analytic Cloud running on Cisco UCS, FICO is helping
customers achieve their analytics goals faster and putting predictive
analytics within the reach of more companies. FICO developers, clients,
and partners can use FICO tools to easily build, implement, and scale
new analytics applications in the cloud to make better business decisions.
What used to take months, or longer, can now be done in days.
“We’ve reduced time to value for developing analytic solutions by up to
70 percent versus on-premises software, allowing customers to quickly
develop applications and sell them in the FICO Analytic Cloud Marketplace,”
says Trkay. “We’re also able to bring our offerings to new verticals, such as
providing pricing optimization to airlines and energy companies.”
© 2016 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
70%
TtV
Reduction
Analytics
Delivery
Case Study
FICO
Focusing on core competencies
The manageability of Cisco UCS and Nexus helps FICO keep service
levels high, which enables FICO to focus on what’s important—
developing and providing a world-class analytics platform.
“The FICO Analytic Cloud is a multiproduct environment, and we need to
be able to quickly segment and manage the underlying infrastructure,”
says Trkay. “Using Cisco UCS service profiles, we can do this on a very
granular level while concentrating on improving our applications.”
Synergies gained from partnership
A new software delivery model requires a new relationship model, Trkay
explains: “Cisco, Red Hat, and our implementation partner World Wide
Technology all came together to provide services, with a shared goal
and vision, which helped us achieve success early.”
Results
Preparing for future innovation and transformation
FICO is undertaking a proof of concept for Cisco® Metapod, a fully
managed, on-premises solution for OpenStack. “It just makes sense
to offload our OpenStack operations to cloud experts at Cisco,” says
Trkay. OpenStack skill sets are difficult to find on the open market and
expensive. FICO has taken the approach of focusing our investment
in OpenStack engineering personnel and getting operational maturity
via Cisco Metapod. We also are investigating Cisco Application Centric
Infrastructure (ACI) to accelerate application deployment in our private
cloud even further.”
FICO’s Big Data Reference Architecture on Cisco UCS
UCS 6200 Series
Fabric Interconnect
/5 10Gb
Helping customers operate at the speed of business
Thousands of FICO customers are seeing the benefits of the FICO
Analytic Cloud and are already using it to build, consume, and
commercialize their analytics applications. “We’ve seen strong adoption
and heard very positive feedback from our customers,” says Trkay.
“They can run better marketing campaigns by determining the best
offers to push to their customers.”
/9 10Gb
Service Profiles
Red Hat
FICO
/5 10Gb
UCS C240 M4 Series
6x Worker Nodes
/9 10Gb
FICO Decision
Management Suite
DM Platform
Big Data Analyzer
Data Management
Integration Platform
Data Orchestrator
© 2016 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
UCS Manager
UCS C220 M4 Series 2x
Master Nodes
Data Virtualization (CIS)
Virtual Data Models
Active Cluster
Ingest Rate
1x Server
50MB/s
Hadoop
External Sources
Data Warehouse
Excel Files
RDMS
XML
Web Services
SAP
Case Study
FICO
Products and Services
Data Center
• Cisco Metapod
• Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS)
• Cisco UCS C-Series Rack Servers
• Cisco UCS Central Software
• Cisco Nexus 5000 and 9000 Series Switches
Fabric Interconnects
• Cisco UCS Fabric Interconnects
Network Management
• Cisco UCS Manager
Storage
• EMC
OS
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform
• Red Hat OpenShift Enterprise
Partner
• World Wide Technology
© 2016 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Cisco and the Cisco logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Cisco and/or its affiliates in the U.S.
and other countries. To view a list of Cisco trademarks, go to this URL: www.cisco.com/go/trademarks. Third-party trademarks mentioned are the property of
their respective owners. The use of the word partner does not imply a partnership relationship between Cisco and any other company. (1110R)
Cxx-xxxxxx-xx 04/16