What Happened?

About the Company

Sears Holdings Corporation is a leading integrated retailer focused on seamlessly connecting the digital and physical shopping experiences to serve our members -- wherever, whenever and however they want to shop. Sears Holdings is home to Shop Your Way(R) , a social shopping platform offering members rewards for shopping at Sears and Kmart as well as with other retail partners across categories important to them. The company operates through its subsidiaries, including Sears, Roebuck and Co. and Kmart Corporation, with more than 2,350 full-line and specialty retail stores in the United States and Canada.

About the Person

Phil Shelley began his firm Newton Park Partners two weeks ago. He hopes to bring his deep experience working with Hadoop and NoSQL software to help other companies that want to conduct Big Data analytics. At Sears, Mr. Shelley used Hadoop to help the company offload some data processing from its mainframe computers. Using inexpensive servers running Hadoop software to manage data, Sears was able to reduce the time it took to run pricing algorithms from eight weeks to less than one week. That helped Sears create more dynamic pricing and start offering customers personalized discounts through its loyalty program.