Picture a 65-year-old company that has amassed data on 100 million people. Suddenly, it learns that data is the new oil commodity, but its on-premises legacy computing infrastructure isn’t cut out for advanced analytics. Does it trash its data center and rush to public cloud? Or can it take a more balanced approach and still cash in?

The company in question is Publishers Clearing House LLC. It markets merchandise and magazine subscriptions with sweepstakes and various games customers play to win prizes. PCH finds itself in the position that many large legacy companies are in nowadays. It has a boatload of data that cloud-native startups would love to loot, but it lacks the latter’s baggage-free agility in the computing department.

“Because we are such an old company, we still have our legacy DB2 infrastructure,” said Ash Dhupar (pictured), chief analytics officer for PCH. “A lot of our back-end databases, a lot of our back-end processes are all attached to that.”

Dhupar spoke with Rebecca Knight (@knightrm) and Paul Gillin (@pgillin), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the IBM CDO Summit in Boston, Massachusetts. They discussed how PCH serves customers’ data back to them and its hybrid IT architecture for analytics. (* Disclosure below.)

On again, off again

The company has invested in modernizing initiatives that leverage customers’ data to better serve them. It pools its own data with data from other sources to personalize customers’ experience on its website and through direct mail. Customer data informs the intelligent recommendation engine on its site, which accounts for 40 percent of its sales, according to Dhupar. PCH has perfected the blend of infrastructure with some on-prem-cloud compromises and trial and error.

About three years ago, PCH began migrating workloads to cloud. However, it found the cloud environment lost against on-prem in some things.

“We have a MapR cluster, which was cloud-based, and now we have brought it on-prem very recently,” Dhupar said. MapR is a leading platform for data analytics and artificial intelligence. Running it on-prem is cheaper and allows PCH greater control over things like data privacy, according to Dhupar.

“For our web analytics, we use Google’s BigQuery — that’s where you collect a lot of data on a daily basis,” he stated.

The company sidesteps sticky compliance issues by hiding personally identifiable information from analytics. “Frankly, the analytics teams don’t need the PII information to build any algorithms as well,” Dhupar concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the IBM CDO Summit. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the IBM CDO Summit. Neither IBM, the event sponsor, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE