Yellow Pages began as a telephone directory of businesses more than 100 years ago in 1883. Today the print giant, which was essentially out of business with the dawn of the Internet, has morphed into one of the top 30 U.S. digital properties managing over 45 petabytes of data.

Bill Theisinger, vice president of Big Data Services at Yellowpages.com, sat down with John Furrier and Dave Vellante on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE’s Media production team, at the HP Big Data Conference 2015 to explain how a century-old business transitions from the printing world into a leading data-technology business.

Changing roles

How did they make the transition? According to Theisinger, “YP has an engineering culture that has always been engaged in bringing small business and consumer together.” He explained how the team made the move into the next generation of the business by transferring assets, data and advertisers over to a digital platform.

Defining Big Data

The challenges Yellowpages.com faces with Big Data is integration. “YP is managing over 50 data sources … all of this requires a framework that captures click stream data along with the tools to proactively collect and  analyze the information,” said Theisinger.

However, the biggest challenge facing the Big Data Service team at Yellowpages.com is finding the tools to analyze and distribute the data to the key practitioner.

When asked what the biggest surprise in the industry is, Theisinger responded by saying, “The lack of business intelligence and reporting vendors in the marketplace. There is not a lot of innovation in this area.” He feels that an enterprise needs to have access to insights anywhere in the data chain.

“There needs to be a change of mindset where data drives the enterprise culture,” he added.

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of the HP Big Data Conference 2015.

 Photo by SiliconANGLE