Beta user enlists service to learn about dropped users
Data mining and analysis might become more pervasive with the arrival of digiMine Inc., an application service provider (ASP) that officially opens for business this week.
The Kirkland, Wash.-based ASP, which was founded in March by former Microsoft Corp. employees, last week unveiled its digiMine Services, including the Data Slurper.
The Data Slurper assembles Web server data from Oracle, SQL, DB2 and other databases and securely transmits it to the company’s data-mining application, which is hosted off-site.
The ASP then runs a series of predefined reports on everything from page-view to online-event analyses.
Today, organizations require a “special infrastructure to do data analysis,” said Frank Gillett, an analyst at Forrester Research Inc. in Cambridge, Mass.
Gillett said digiMine offers a general-purpose architecture for data mining and analysis that can generate standard reports, or users can pay to have custom programs written that go beyond the preconfigured analyses.
Yongmin Chu, marketing research manager at Dialpad.com Inc. in Santa Clara, Calif., has been using a beta version of Data Slurper and plans to continue using the service. He said his voice-over-Internet Protocol company has used digiMine Services to help with a range of issues, including “user drop-off during our registration process.”
Chu added, “It’s been very convenient for us because we haven’t had to add more software to our PCs.”
Mimi Green, a market analyst at Dialpad.com, said the company also benefited from not having to hire more employees to develop and manage a similar application.
Usama Fayyad, digiMine’s CEO and co-founder, said his firm’s top competition would come from information technology shops building their own data-mining software.
By: Mark Hall
Computerworld
Source: Computerworld / PDF