NEWTON, MA--(Marketwired - Nov 12, 2015) - Paytronix Systems, Inc., a leading provider of reward program solutions to restaurants and retailers, today announced the appointment of Big Data expert Tom Harrison as head of the company's Distributed Data Processing (DDP) team. Harrison will be responsible for the unstructured data portion of the Paytronix Rewards Platform as it scales to meet record demand of more than three billion annual transactions.
With proven experience in developing high-traffic user-facing websites, Harrison is well known within the local software industry for his ability to attract and nurture talented young developers in fast-moving startup environments.
"The unstructured data portion of the Paytronix Rewards Platform is built on an open source Big Data tool set that includes the data stores MongoDB, Hadoop and now Apache Spark," said Harrison. "Moving forward, the challenge for the Paytronix Distributed Data team will be to optimize our existing technology infrastructure while constantly incorporating the best Big Data innovations as they come to market."
Mr. Harrison brings several decades of experience leading engineering teams, primarily focused on managing large scale data and processing. Working for DirectHit and then Ask Jeeves (now Ask.com), Harrison led the engineering team that gathered and indexed billions of web pages. By understanding the nature of various sites selling and reviewing consumer electronics, Harrison developed a tunable algorithmic scoring engine that helped customers identify the most suitable products to consider.
"Paytronix has led the industry in bringing Big Data tools to deliver more relevant and timely customer engagement," said Andrew Robbins, president of Paytronix Systems, Inc. "We know that there is so much more that can be done with these tools. With that in mind, we recruited Tom Harrison to lead our Big Data Analytics engineering team. Tom has lead several of Boston's most innovative startups in the area of Big Data search and scoring across industries that include internet search, travel advice and social networking. We are delighted that he will help Paytronix bring these revolutionary technologies to the restaurant and convenience store markets."
Paytronix embraces Big Data, bringing together POS data, loyalty data, social media and other disparate data sources to discover new opportunities for compelling visits and spending -- efficiently identifying and automating 1-1 guest engagement.
Prior to DirectHit and Ask Jeeves, Harrison also worked for TripAdvisor and its spin-off DigitalAdvisor, handling very large volumes of transactional and analytics data. At Pubget, he led engineering to ingest and index searches across 100's of millions of scientific research papers. Harrison has a degree in Economics from Princeton University.
About Paytronix Systems, Inc.
Paytronix's proprietary guest engagement platform helps more than 250 restaurant and retail chains manage and grow more than $10 Billion in guest spend. Customers benefit from big data consumer insights that Paytronix generates from 1-to-1 engagement with more than 20 million loyal guests -- through mobile, social and today's most innovative digital marketing tools. As a result, customers can more effectively segment and motivate their guests to increase spend and drive revenue. For more information, visit www.paytronix.com.