The Business Intelligence Blog

Teradata Corporation has introduced a new family of platforms from entry-level to active enterprise data warehouses that addresses many customer needs (especially of Indian and other similar markets). Powered by the Teradata 12.0 database engine, the family includes Teradata 550 SMP (symmetric multiprocessing), Teradata 2500, and Teradata 5550.

Teradata 550 SMP is a departmental data warehouse, designed to meet customers’ need for a smaller, less expensive system. It is simple to set up and can use the Novell SUSE Linux 64-bit operating system or Windows. In addition, customers can license and run the Teradata 12 database on their choice of Intel-based platforms, starting at $40,000. Teradata Express Edition, a free developer version of Teradata 12, is available to work on Windows servers and laptops for development, testing and learning.

From EFY News article.

According to Ian Michiels, an analyst with Aberdeen Group Inc., successful companies find a way to more tightly integrate marketing and sales. “How do you prioritize the leads that go into the sales pipeline? Metrics that help you do that are going to make you more effective,” he said. The goal is to find ways to define the best leads, whether that’s by the number of times a potential customer has gone to a Web site, attended a webinar or visited a trade-show booth. Only send the best leads to sales.

Once you provide this information, Rego said, your reps have the information they need to close more sales. “The carrot is providing sales with as much ammunition as needed to close the sale. The way you need [to] do that is tight integration from the marketing automation system into the SFA system.” Once you do this, you begin to build a consensus around the definition of a “good lead.” Rego said this approach gives marketing a view into the sales funnel and can provide marketing-level information as the sales staff approaches a sales opportunity.

Read the entire article on Marketing analytics at Inside CRM.

Varolii Corporation today announced Varolii Predictive Analytics(TM), an on-demand service that helps organizations understand, analyze and strategically target more effective customer outreach for collections, customer service and loyalty programs. Varolii unveiled Predictive Analytics at Interaction ’08, the company’s inaugural customer conference.

Combining client data with the behavioral insight gleaned from billions of Varolii-led customer interactions, Varolii Predictive Analytics helps companies identify who to contact, when to contact them, through what channel, using which treatment, and how frequently in order to generate the greatest response. This combined data offers much more than a simple success or failure measurement; it’s a complete record of customer interaction and response on an individual level. The application is designed to gain intelligence from these conversations and progressively “learn” to predict customer behavior.
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At the highest level, Varolii Predictive Analytics can help companies analyze contact strategy options (e.g., automated communications, an in-house call center, outsourced agents, or a combination of them) and select which will work best to solve their specific needs. At a more tactical level, it can help decide such things as an appropriate collection strategy based on Varolii and customer history, including probability to pay, days delinquent, and other metrics for improved results.

Read more from the Press Release.

“As an early adopter of RAP – The Trading Edition, our trading desk has been able to be more responsive to market opportunities through faster, more complete analysis of market data, both historical and real-time feeds,” said Jason Ross, director, Rates Trading Group at MUSI. “We were pleasantly surprised at the performance speed, and found we need only half the storage capacity to store the same amount of data.”

Other key beneficiaries of the solution include quantitative analysts, risk managers, and compliance officers. Analysts can run powerful quantitative models against years’ worth of time-series market data, trading histories, and reference data, with complex analysis running in minutes vs. hours; risk managers can monitor balance sheet exposure hourly to reduce firm-wide risk; and compliance officers can audit the trade flow to meet the latest market compliance requirements.

“RAP – The Trading Edition is the only integrated solution today with the ability to absorb streaming market data feeds and consolidate these with vast stores of historical data for common shared access and analysis. We offer an enterprise-class platform that can offer a single source of data to the entire trade life cycle, from quantitative analysis, through pre-trade pricing, to market risk analysis and compliance,” said Dr. Raj Nathan, Chief Marketing Officer at Sybase. “In today’s unforgiving market environment, financial services firms need best-in-class, bullet-proof solutions that afford instantaneous throughput with no down-time. Sybase® RAP – The Trading Edition is very robust, having a built-in administrative console and dependable business continuity/disaster recovery solutions to protect against system failures.”

More on RAP – The Trading Edition from the Press Release.

From CNN -

This new version of Behavioral Analytics(TM) software also enhances the analysis of non-interaction time (long periods of hold and silence) in contact center interactions. Non-interaction time is a significant issue for contact centers as it often represents up to 30% of a contact center’s total talk time. Behavioral Analytics(TM) clients will now have a more detailed understanding of what CSR’s do during periods of non-interaction. These insights will enable companies to better manage CSR performance variability and improve inefficient business processes.

As part of its Managed Services delivery model, eLoyalty has made significant investments to continuously upgrade the functionality of Behavioral Analytics(TM) software. These investments include multiple dedicated development environments; a large database of test customer interactions; regression testing tools; and numerous highly skilled linguists, analysts and developers.