The world is changing rapidly. We are becoming less loyal to our suppliers. Switching is easier than ever before. But the landscape of vendors is huge. We can not only do business with banks originated in the country you live in, but international banks are offering their services too. At sometimes interesting interest rates… But what do we know about these vendors? Do we keep track of them? Do we know that Icesave is a daughter company of Landsbanki? And if we do business with both, do we know our total risk when they collapse, as happened previous week? It is time for consumers to stand up, time to take control. We need the Single Vendor View! Let’s think about VDI: Vendor Data Integration!
Monthly Archives: October 2008
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I am not Eddy!
Do you feel like I do? Everytime I register for a site, like this blogging area, I have to enter my name. First of all, this is annoying. Why can’t I keep track of a single set of data, somewhere in the big internet cloud, and just point to it? No, impossible! We apparently need to create multiple alter egos in the cloud to survive in the digital jungle. And once you decided to create again a new alter ego, you get these questions again: username? Password?
As a username, Eddy seems a logical choice… No, already exists. Now I am forced to think of something else. Eddy Reimerink maybe? No, spaces not allowed, neither are capitals. Let’s try eddyreimerink. Phew! Done. Again, created a new alter ego, a username that is a non-existing name and different from all the other user names I use. How do I manage this data quality problem?
Forrester Wave Finds Initiate Systems and Siperian at the Center of Customer Hubs
In addition to those two vendors, Dun & Bradstreet’s Purisma and Oracle UCM remain near the top of the research firm’s latest report.
By Lauren McKay – Posted Aug 11, 2008
No earth-shattering changes occurred in the latest Forrester Research Wave for Customer Hubs, according to analyst and report author Ray Wang. However, Forrester notes that the market remains in the early-adoption stage for full-blown customer hub solutions. Wang defines the goal of the customer hub segment’s goal in that it “operationalizes the acquisition, distribution, and management of customer information for the use in other systems.” Wang notes that the market is broadening and organizations — especially those with high-volume B2C data — will find that vendors have solutions geared for a company’s every need.
“The good news: Solutions have matured and work well in heterogeneous environments,” Wang writes. “The down side: Enterprises remain challenged with defining data governance and data quality policies while optimizing systems for an information supply chain.” Forrester bases its evaluation upon a product’s current offering, its market presence, and the strategy of the vendor producing it. Additionally, the research firm requires that customer hub vendors provide 20 customer references of live deployments. Wang points out that while some solutions are being implemented, a significant number of customer hub purchases remain on the shelf — either not yet deployed or remaining stagnant as part of a broader product suite.
Wang’s report shows Initiate Systems and Siperian leading the vendor pack. “In a virtual dead heat, both best-of-breed vendors widen the gap among their closest competitors by offering improved data stewardship capabilities, richer hierarchy management, stronger industry support, and greater support for third-party tools,” he writes. Wang refers to Siperian as “the smartest kid on the block,” praising the vendor’s expertise in data acquisition, data cleansing, relationship and hierarchy management, event management, reference data management, data stewardship, and architecture. As for Initiate, Wang says that the vendor has delivered the most significant research-and-development gains in the past 18 months and also has the largest number of productive live customers.
IBM, Dun & Bradstreet’s Purisma, and Oracle Siebel UCM follow close behind in the Leader zone. Wang notes that IBM’s dot on the board has gotten bigger, saying that customer data is a clear strength for the company. Wang also writes that D&B’s recent acquisition of Purisma has helped the organization to bridge gaps in its offerings and go to market with a strong, global B2B solution. Additionally, he points out that Purisma scored in the top rankings for satisfaction in the reference surveys.
Wang says there are a lot of alternatives for companies to sort through in the customer hub market: Just behind the leaders on the Wave report are Sun Microsystems with its open-source master data management options, Oracle CDH, Scotland-based VisionWare, SAS Institute’s DataFlux, and SAP. “Customer hubs make sure CRM is successful and that’s why it is so important to evaluate the [technologies] underlying the CRM processes,” he explains. ” ‘Is the data helping me understand how to cross-sell and upsell? And how do we target our customers?’ ” He goes on to say that CDI vendors seem to have thought through every customer scenario an organization might face. “At this point in the market I think the technology is ahead of the customer,” Wang says.
Platform, Software and Data as a Services?!
What are PaaS, SaaS and DaaS?
The IT industry loves acronomys and if you look for SaaS on the Acronymfinder.com webpage you find many more definitions then you could every dream up.
The ‘as a Service’ category of software is getting a lot of attention with companies like SalesForce, Oracle (Siebel), Amazon, HP and Microsoft building strategies around the promise of cloud computing. Simply put ‘as a Service’ delivers services that are hosted, managed and maintained by the supplier rather then the user. More often then not the services are provided with a ‘pay-per-use’ model.
So Platform as a Service (PaaS) offerings like Amazon EC2, SalesForce Force.com and Google App Engine all host a platform over the internet that allows customers to develop and deploy applications. The user does not have to worry about hardware, operating systems, application servers or databases but can use the platform and pay the provider to for its use.
Similar is the offering with Software as a Service (SaaS). Applications are available to end users through a web-browser over the internet. The supplier takes care of running the software and the customer simply pays for using the software. Increasingly applications that we are used to install on our own computers/service will become available as a Service. These include Siebel (Oracle), SAP ERP and even Microsoft Office.
An upcoming catergory are providers of Data as a Service (DaaS) who make data management available over the internet. Data as a Service may give asses to data providers like Chamber of Commerce, Experian, telephone directories and D&B but also provide functions like address validation or blacklist matching.
Peter Laird (Oracle) has created a comprehensive ‘SaaS tree’ that builds an overview of the ‘as a Service’ offerings out there.
SaaS Tree
Whether PaaS, SaaS or DaaS offerings can provide value to your organisation depends on many factors. Obvious advantages include its pricing model and low maintence cost. On the flip side you may find that the service is hard to fully customise to your needs and that the connecting ‘cloud services’ to your existing IT infrastructure can be a pain.
In any case the expectation of analyst, large vendors and many journalist is that ‘cloud computing’ will increasingly influence the IT industry.
Usability Literature
As I was contemplating what to write in my first post, I started thinking of last Tuesday, when I was attending the Dutch data quality award ceremony in Amsterdam. A very interesting event, organized by the data quality committee of the DDMA ( Dutch Dialogue and Direct Marketing Association).
After a presentation by TomTom on sharing map information through a community, I participated in a kind of bizarre discussion on usability of data, the value of open source data quality communities and literature. This last discussion topic was triggered by the oftentimes enigmatic dialogue boxes in Windows; “Are you sure that you are certain that you want to quit this application?”
As the discussion continued I wondered how a more literary approach would enhance the value of user interfaces. Here’s an example (with gratitude to my good friend Cronopio):
If Shakespeare had been a GUI designer
Now that’s usability value!
Who are my customers?
For marketeers it is a daily struggle. Where are my customers, what do they like, how can I reach them? Building a single view of the customer requires knowing a fair bit about them.
Ideally you want to know more then the data points your organisation is able to collect like address, order history and phone number (and please let those be accurate). What would really help effective marketing is to know your customer’s contact preferences, social demographics, financial health, social network, employment, daily commute, etc. etc.
Keeping your data accurate with people moving, dying and changing jobs all the time is difficult enough as it is. Keeping abreast of your customers social data seems virually impossible. Has anyone experimented with collecting social network data to do this?