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SOLUTIONS STAYING

CUSTOMER PROFILE COUNTRY: United States ON INDUSTRY: Recruitment advertising and human resources services FOUNDED: 1995 NUMBER OF EMPLOYEES: More than 2,000 THE FAST WEB ADDRESS: www.CareerBuilder.com CHALLENGE CareerBuilder wanted to speed up the processing of business intelligence TRACK data to provide business managers and partners with more timely information How does the nation’s largest online career site stay ahead? on the status of their business. Older CareerBuilder opts to keep growth strong by leveraging business technology and third-party business intelligence software were not able to intelligence to deliver thousands of reports up to 30 percent keep pace with the increasing amount of faster with solutions from Dell and Microsoft. data and processing required to support the company’s growth.

SOLUTION Dell and Microsoft partnered to provide a new business intelligence solution based on Microsoft® SQL Server®, Microsoft business intelligence software, Dell™ PowerEdge™ servers, and a Dell/EMC storage system.

BENEFITS Get IT Faster

resources to migrate a business intelligence solution quickly to Microsoft software and Dell hardware and helped provide architecture for new reports

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The recruitment advertising industry has undergone massive change and restructuring since the advent of the Internet. Online job boards, once perceived as a market threat, have proven that recruitment advertising is vital for every company’s portfolio. In recent years, newspaper companies have emerged as vibrant participants in the online recruitment advertising business with the meteoric rise of Chicago-based CareerBuilder. “ WE KNOW WE CAN COUNT ON DELL HARDWARE BECAUSE IT’S RELIABLE. THIS HELPS SIMPLIFY OUR IT CHALLENGES. WITH DELL WE KNOW WE ARE PRODUCING REPORTS FAST AND DELIVERING THEM ON TIME.”

Rob Wittes, Business Intelligence Development Manager, CareerBuilder

BUILDING A HIGH-POWER CAREER CareerBuilder serves 92 percent of the FOR- HOW IT WORKS Three newspaper groups—Gannett Company, TUNE 1,000 and 93 percent of the FORTUNE Tribune Company, and The McClatchy 500 and hosts more than 23 million unique HARDWARE Company—back the fast-growing online em- visitors per month. Clearly this company knows ployment advertising company, and a minority how to navigate a high-power career. with Intel® Xeon® processors share is held by Microsoft Corporation, which partners with CareerBuilder to deliver the LEVERAGING DATA TO STAY MSN Careers channel in the U.S. and employ- ON TRACK SOFTWARE ® ment Web sites abroad. AOL powers its online The company plans to stay on this fast track 2003 career advertising site with CareerBuilder, as with its growing portfolio of corporate talent do 1,600 other business partners, including 140 solutions that complement its recruitment ™ newspapers. One-fifth the size of the market postings of 1.6 million jobs per year. To make PerformancePoint Server leader five years prior, CareerBuilder passed the right business decisions, CareerBuilder its largest competitor in revenue in 2006 and scours its data warehouse for reports on cus- stands as the nation’s largest online job site. tomers and sales daily so it can relay the latest The $768 million company holds a 34 percent business intelligence (BI) information to the market share in the U.S. and operates in sev- field as early in the day as possible. Marketing eral countries overseas. A total of 2,589 people dashboards and key performance indicators sell CareerBuilder products and services. have to be refreshed in a timely fashion so that 0809rcp_Dell_Insert 7/10/09 3:48 PM Page 3

“ HAVING A MORE EFFICIENT IT PLATFORM THAT’S FAST AND HIGHLY AVAILABLE ENABLES OUR TECHNOLOGY RESOURCES TO FOCUS ON PROVIDING VALUE TO OUR CUSTOMERS.”

Daniel Cosey, Director of Corporate Operations, CareerBuilder

product managers and corporate executives Microsoft BI solution, which includes Two older Dell PowerEdge 2850 and 1850 serv- can steer the best course. Speed is what the Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Integration Ser- ers, which had been running BI applications company needs in order to assess its per- vices, Analysis Services, Reporting Services, and the database, were still performing to ex- formance and make successful inroads with Excel 2007, and ProClarity. A long-time Dell pectations, and CareerBuilder kept them in the winning products and services. customer, the company migrated the SQL new infrastructure. CareerBuilder is also using Server 2005 database to Dell PowerEdge 6850 a Dell/EMC CX700 storage system to back up But speed was not what the company was get- and 2950 servers with Intel Xeon processors. its large data warehouse and help ensure that ting from the third-party BI software that was data is available to users when they need it. providing reports from CareerBuilder’s data The four-way Dell PowerEdge 6850 servers “We’ve been a longtime Dell/EMC customer; warehouse system. These reports were vital to are clustered with Microsoft Windows Server the products have been exceptional, and the the decision-making processes of CareerBuild- 2003 and run the SQL Server 2005 data ware- support is very good too,” says Femi Ogundimu, er’s executive managers and its partners. In house. “We find the Dell PowerEdge 6850 serv- senior infrastructure engineer with the BI team addition, the third-party BI software required ers very effective for the scale-up architecture at CareerBuilder. “Now, business intelligence large amounts of administrative time, taking for our database, which is continually growing applications require very, very quick response away resources from higher-value projects. as our data and our business grow,” says from the storage systems, or our users will be Wittes. In fact, CareerBuilder currently stores unhappy. We ran performance benchmarks on “We produce several thousand reports a day,” over 7 terabytes of data, with capacity for up several storage systems, and we were very says Rob Wittes, business intelligence devel- to 11 terabytes. The company processes one pleased with the speed and output we got from opment manager for CareerBuilder. “These million unique visitors a day and delivers nearly the CX700.” reports go not only to the leadership of the 20 million separate page views, according to company, but also to the managers, account Daniel Cosey, director of corporate operations “We know we can count on Dell hardware representatives, and salespeople that directly at CareerBuilder. “So having a more efficient because it’s reliable,” says Wittes. “This helps deal with our customers and our partners. IT platform that’s fast and highly available simplify our IT challenges. With Dell we know Another way we leverage business intelligence enables our technology resources to focus on we are producing reports fast and delivering for our strategic advantage is doing deeper providing value to our customers,” he says. them on time.” analysis. People can go into our business intelligence portal and actually drill down to The Dell PowerEdge 2950 servers are being To help migrate the BI applications, Dell and specific questions that help them see what the used to scale out CareerBuilder’s extract, Microsoft partnered to put a Microsoft SQL status of their business is and take actions to transformation, and load (ETL) environment Server BI expert on site at CareerBuilder improve their business.” that integrates data from operational stores where in-house experts were making into the data warehouse using Microsoft SQL performance and tuning adjustments to the BUILDING A SOLID FOUNDATION Server Integration Services. “We found that SQL Server 2005 environment. This resulted in FOR EXCELLENT RESULTS the Dell PowerEdge 2950 servers scale out new reports and BI processes that the CareerBuilder decided to refresh the platform very nicely,” says Wittes. “We’re taking advan- business needed. supporting its BI solution by migrating to new tage of the great price-performance attributes hardware. The company also decided to move of those servers.” from the third-party BI solution to a pure 0809rcp_Dell_Insert 7/14/09 9:06 AM Page 4

GETTING 30% FASTER At CareerBuilder, data is an asset, a fact which PERFORMANCE is reflected by the company’s leadership com- “With the new Dell PowerEdge servers and SQL munication, data management, and physical Server 2005 database platform, we achieved a architecture investments. In the future, Ca- reerBuilder.com plans to use Microsoft Office our previous eight-way servers, even though PerformancePoint Server to share information our global expansion is putting bigger demands with employees and even externally with cus- on our IT environment,” Cosey reports. “More- tomers. “Dell has been a valuable resource for over, we found that the Microsoft BI software us. We look forward to working with them and cost less than the third-party BI applications Microsoft in other key areas,” says Wittes. we evaluated.” For more information on this case study or to “We noticed right after we implemented the read additional case studies, go to: Dell PowerEdge 6850 servers and upgraded DELL.COM/CaseStudies to our new capabilities that we were able to DELL.COM/SQL

shorten the processing window and provide tes, other countries, or both. some of our European customers with data ir products. EMC is a registered trademark of EMC Corporation. ir products. EMC is a registered trademark of Corporation. much more quickly than they were previously s. Microsoft, SQL Server, Microsoft PerformancePoint, SQL Server s. Microsoft, SQL Server, used to,” says Wittes. “When we produce these reports on a regular basis, we know we’re producing them fast and delivering them on time to meet our business needs.” “ WE’VE BEEN A LONGTIME DELL/ EMC CUSTOMER; THE PRODUCTS HAVE BEEN EXCEPTIONAL, AND THE SUPPORT IS VERY GOOD TOO.”

Femi Ogundimu, Senior Infrastructure Engineer, CareerBuilder and Windows Server are either registered trademarks or of Microsoft Corporation in the United Sta March 2008 Printed in the U.S.A. All trademarks and trade names may be used in this document to refer either the entities claiming marks or Intel and Xeon are registered trademarks of Corporation or its subsidiaries in the United States other countrie

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