Steal These Ideas!: Marketing Secrets That Will Make You a Star, 2nd Edition

MPP Will Make Customer Service Phone Operators Unnecessary

Back in the late 1980s and through the 1990s, MPP (massive parallel processing) was the state-of-the-art supercomputing solution that many firms employed to cost-effectively store and analyze billions of bytes of customer data. MPP started out as a Defense Department–funded project to speed up the development of stealth technology. This computing method then jumped to oil companies for use in predicting where oil deposits might be. And, eventually, a few consumer-facing firms embraced MPP—most notably Dow Jones and American Express.

The concept for MPP is simple. Prior to its arrival on the scene, all processing was done in serial fashion. Let's say your customer database has 500,000 ...