Companies that attended the National Center for Database Marketing show held late last month in Chicago backed up the statements of DMA president/CEO H. Robert Wientzen that the database marketing industry is booming, and announced a slew of new mergers and products. Among the announcements were the following:
* Acxiom Corp., Little Rock, AR, announced an upgrade to its Rapidus analysis tool that is a module of its Solvitur Market Management Solution. The new version of Rapidus provides marketers with a cost-effective and flexible solution to perform counts and profiles on databases in a few seconds.
In addition, the company announced that it has formed an agreement with PerformanceData, Chicago, a division of Trains Union LLC, to link databases to combine credit and real property/demographic data for Fair Credit Reporting Act compliant pre-screen marketing programs.
* Braun Consulting, a Chicago-based provider of business intelligence, data warehousing, customer relationship management and Web-based application solutions, announced that it acquired Vertex Partners, a Boston consulting firm
that works with Fortune 500 companies and global organizations to develop and implement customer-driven strategies to increase sales and marketing performance.
* CPM, East Peoria, IL, a CRM vendor that focuses on the health care
industry, announced that it has formed a strategic alliance with Healthdemographics, Nashville, to provide health care executives with a combination of customer information, industry data, and analytic resources in one comprehensive solution.
* Dataspace Inc., a data warehouse consultancy in Ann Arbor, MI, announced the launch of its new Accelerated Warehouse Implementation offering. AWI combines pre-designed components with the requisite, fixed-fee consulting services to deliver a fully functioning data warehouse or data mart. According to the company, delivery times are reduced by 75 percent, compared with those needed for traditional development efforts.
* Siebel Systems, San Mateo, CA, and Dun & Bradstreet, Murray Hill, NJ, announced a strategic merger of D&B's business intelligence data with Siebel Systems' Web-based front office applications, which has resulted in a new product module called the Siebel D&B Integration Solution.
The module will give customers the ability to access D&B's market data from within Siebel Systems' sales, marketing and customer service applications. Organizations will be able to profile an entire organization instantly to understand its history, location, size, products and services; quickly obtain information about a company's structure to identify key decision makers; create more targeted marketing lists to reach the right organizations and individuals; and view an organization's credit background to understand its fiscal history. Through the agreement, D&B also will offer data rationalization services that will consolidate, cleanse and eliminate redundant account and contact records.
* Exchange Applications, Boston, announced the release of the newest version of its marketing software called Valex 3.0. The new version gives marketers the ability to influence desired customer behaviors, attribute customer behaviors to particular marketing campaigns, analyze the impact of those behaviors and gauge the effectiveness of marketing initiatives. Other enhancements include two new major modules called Valex Response Manager and Valex Response Analyzer.
Exchange also announced that Pricewaterhouse Coopers, a professional services firm, will be offering Valex campaign management software to its clients as part of its customer relationship management solution.
* Firstlogic, La Crosse, WI, made several announcements regarding their i.d. Centric brand of solutions, including the introduction of its e-data quality suite online, which cleanses names and addresses in Internet, intranet or extranet applications in real-time; the update of its TrueName Library software, TrueName Library 2.32, which offers added capabilities of identifying words and phrases from several industries such as financial, insurance, legal and banking; and a new phone number look-up feature, which allows businesses to enter in a phone number and retrieve all the customer information associated with it has been added to Firstlogic's Clear ID solution.
* Group 1 Software, Lanham, MD, announced the latest release of Model 1, its flagship software product for data mining and campaign management. Enhancements in the new release include refined reporting capabilities, increased power to plug and play Model 1 into existing applications and increased control of the building model process and client-server operations.
* MarketSwitch Corp., Sterling, VA, announced that its optimization software MarketSwitch workstation has been purchased by DynaMark, A Fair, Issac Co., to help its clients evaluate, target, and generate the most appropriate direct marketing offers to their customers. In addition, the company announced today that it has applied for five patents for its software.
* NCR Corp., Dayton, OH, unveiled its NCR Relationship Optimizer, CRM software The software, which provides a complete CRM channel across all types of customer channels, begins with a detailed analysis of a customer's behavior, and also looks at things such as events the customer took part in, the types of communication they use and prefer, an individual dialog management before deciding when to launch marketing campaigns and the best way to reach the best
customers.
* Pricewaterhouse Coopers, Dallas, SAS Institute Inc., Cary, NC, and Exchange Applications, Boston, announced that they are planning to work together to deliver enterprise customer relationship management solutions. Through this collaboration, customers in the retail, financial services and telecommunications industries will benefit from the systems integration experience of Pricewaterhouse Coopers; the data-warehousing, data-mining, and decision-support software solutions of SAS Institute; and customer-value optimizing campaign-management software from Exchange Applications. * Saligent Software Colorado Springs, announced that it is offering an enhanced version of its High-Yield Marketing business-to-business marketing and sales automation software. The new version, version 2.1, includes enhanced advertising and promotion campaign and event management handling, Web import tolls, a new graphical profiling tool and e-mail integration for broadcast electronic transmittal to targeted lists.
