According to a recently published case study, Mzinga is one of the latest Teradata customers to make use of Aster technology on a large scale. Teradata acquired Aster Data last year.

Mzinga offers a solution called OmniSocial, which is meant to enable organizations to setup community sites where customers, partners and other members of its ecosystem can interact with the given enterprise, or among themselves. Mzinga also provides the tools to analyze these communications, allowing clients to draw insight from members’ activities.  In total, there are about 15,000 OmiSocial sites out there and a total of roughly 40 million users.

The company uses the Teradata Aster SQL-MapReduce framework to carry out analytics. Several different modules are being used to identify things, such as the weight and impact of certain types of interactions, as well as other user trends that have the potential of impacting an organization’s bottom line one way or another.

“With Teradata Aster, we are able to capture, store, and analyze critical data and provide our customers with near real-time insights to make more informed decisions on brand-building and user engagement. Being able to easily analyze multi-structured data sets to better understand and improve our ability to service our users is critical,” said Navdeep Alam, the head of architecture for Mzinga.

Mzinga released the newest version of its offering about three months ago. OmiSocial 2011 introduced several improvements including the ability to capture “Experiences” according to user groups, which came alongside several other major additions.

Back to Aster Data, MapReduce is just as big a part of its plans as it is in Mzinga’s – or at least how it operates today.  Aster Data Marketing VP Tasso Argyros expanded on this topic in an interview in theCube during Hadoop World 2011.