By David Sims
[email protected]
The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music
is silky smooth pop with lyrics etched in acid, Carry On Up the Charts: The Best Of the Beautiful South:
Recently Anurag Wadehra, Vice-President of Marketing
and Product Management of Siperian, which is big into Customer Data Integration
products, took the time to answer some
questions from First CoffeeSM’s mild-mannered reporter alter
ego. Excerpts appear below. The full interview, including Anurag’s thoughts on
what’s coming next for CDI will be published Monday on the TMC site.
Hi Anurag, thanks for
taking the time with us. What exactly is Customer Data Integration?
Customer Data Integration, or CDI as it is often referred
to, is a new software category which combines the necessary technology,
processes and services needed to create and maintain an accurate, timely and
complete view of a customer.
Sounds like the Holy
Grail. How does it differ from other technologies, such as
Extract-Transform-Load, Enterprise Information Integration or, say, Data
Quality initiatives?
Over the past several years, companies have turned to EII,
ETL and DQ technologies in the hopes of addressing their customer data
integration issues. Unfortunately, these are limited set of tools, each of
which originated for narrow purposes.
Each one compliments the CDI platform or framework but none replace it – ETL
moves large volumes of data in batch-mode and is still needed as step in
building a CDI hub; EII was designed to run distributed queries across
disparate sources in real-time and can be used alongside CDI for data
aggregation; and finally DQ tools were designed to de-duplicate and “scrub”
incorrect names and addresses one source at a time and still need to be
integrated with a CDI hub.
What’s the best music
to listen to at work?
Silence is golden! Otherwise, my preference shall be Indian
classical ragas based on the time of the day.
First CoffeeSM’ll
stick to Frank Sinatra. Obviously CDI would be a plus to any CRM initiative,
but what are the industry verticals you see that take it the most seriously and
really invest in CDI?
We are seeing a lot of interest in health and life sciences,
financial services, insurance, telecommunications and high tech industries. The
federal government is yet another area where there is a clear need for this
type of data integration – but in this case the customer is a citizen, a
constituent or an employee.
First CoffeeSM
isn’t much of a techie, but understands that Siperian develops their CDI
products based on the Adaptive Transaction hub style. What’s the business
reason there?
We obviously think this approach is the most suitable for
today’s changing business and IT environments. The Adaptive Transaction hub
style, like the one we offer, emerged most recently to address the limitations
of the other CDI approaches. With the adaptive style, this type of hub is built
as a platform for consolidating data from disparate third party and internal
sources and for serving unified customer views to operational applications,
analytical systems or both. Unlike other styles, this hub is data-model-neutral
and uses templates, is tailored to meet the needs of each industry, and allows
enterprise-specific data models to be implemented quickly. In effect this type
of hub becomes the customer master or “system-of-record” for all systems.
What are the ROI
metrics a company should look for with CDI?
The ROI metrics differ not only industry but by the specific
business processes within each vertical. The most common ROI metrics are in
three categories: acquiring the customer (such as improving cost efficiency of
marketing programs, reducing cost of sales in pharmaceutical companies, etc),
serving the customer (cost & efficacy of strategic account management in
banking, cost of generating quotes in insurance) and ensuring compliance (such
as FDA, CAN-SPAM, Know Your Customer, etc. kind of initiatives). CDI as an
infrastructure enables these benefits that unlock the ROI.
Why do you think there’s
interest in Customer Data Integration?
CDI initially gained in popularity because it finally
fulfills the unmet promise of customer relationship management and business
intelligence applications – achieving a unified view of a customer across touch
points in real-time. And, what is even more important is that CDI allows
companies to manage their most valuable information asset which of course is
customer data. By leveraging a CDI solution, organizations can rapidly respond
to changes in customer data – such as address update – across business
processes which in turn results in more efficient and profitable customer
interactions, reduced customer operations costs and increased accuracy of their
regulatory compliance initiatives.
Customer Data
Integration tools have been in the spotlight recently as a result of IBM’s
recent acquisition of another CDI vendor DWL. Are you concerned about the consequences of this new alliance and what
do you think it means for CDI vendors like yours?
We see this acquisition as a good thing. Not only does this
deal underscore the importance of the customer data integration hub, it proves
there are a lot of major deals out there. As a leading best of breed vendor, Siperian continues to be in a great
position to grow rapidly and partner with leading players which, by the way,
includes IBM for us.
…
Software evaluation firm Technology Evaluation Centers
has created a business process management evaluation center to help companies selecting BPM software.
Business process management is usually defined as a set of
activities organizations use to improve business processes, including interactions
between systems, business processes, and human interaction. According to the
BPM Standards Group, core BPM processes include financial and operational
planning, consolidation and reporting, modeling, analysis, and monitoring of
key performance indicators tied to organizational strategy.
TEC thinks that BPM will be “one of the most important
business drivers of the near future.” TEC has tracked what they term “significant”
increases in customer demand for BPM selection projects, with numbers growing
seven-fold since 2004.
Over the next year, projections suggest that revenue in
licensing for BPM will grow from $700.3 million in 2005 to $1.05 billion
through 2008.
Before companies approach vendors for a request for
proposal, TEC suggests companies engage in an on-line comparison of the leading
solutions under consideration, in order to save time, money, and staffing
resources during the selection process. The TEC BPM Evaluation Center, company
officials claim, “enables end users to match their requirements to the
functionality provided by a variety of BPM solutions.”
Organizations can use the center to analyze vendors on
approximately 600 criteria covering BPM functionality.
…
Got this press release late yesterday, video on demand
vendor itaas
Inc., a provider of end-to-end iTV services in the digital video
industry is announcing the launch of its
latest product, VOD Session Simulator.
Company officials claim it’s “the first commercially
available product of its kind,” as it “gives broadband operators and VOD
service providers a powerful simulation tool that allows them to test their VOD
environments to identify potential problems and bottlenecks in the system and
implement fixes prior to deployment.”
The product gives VOD service providers the ability to test
the VOD environments under various simulated load conditions and patterns,
identify potential problems in the system, and correct the flaws before launch.
Broadband operators can use the tool to help determine the capacity load for
their VOD systems.
If read off-site hit http://blog.tmcnet.com/telecom-crm/
for the fully-linked version. First CoffeeSM accepts no sponsored
content.
