Business intelligence ASP adds personalisation services

Seattle-based Digimine Inc., A BI (business intelligence) ASP (application service provider), on Monday acquired CoRelation Inc., an ASP focusing on personalisation services.

Usama Fayyad, CEO of digiMine, said that the company plans to add personalization as one of its services; others include data warehousing, mining, and campaign analysis.

“Our model says we should be able to take the technology and make it available to our customers for a few thousand dollars more a month,” Fayyad said. He added that digiMine will be able to add the services to customers’ subscription packages with “the flick of a switch.”

CoRelation counts among its customers BarnesandNoble.com Inc., which uses the service to make recommendations, based on purchasing history.

“The technology looks at all the data you have on a customer and helps determine the next action you might want to take across all the touch points of your organization,” said Omar Tawakol, CoRelation’s CEO, who will stay on in Menlo Park, Calif., as vice president of sales.

A survey from International Data Corp. determined that fewer than 5 per cent of respondents currently use an ASP for hosting data warehouses or mining tools, but analysts predict that hosted data warehousing will gain momentum as the ASPs add more functionality to their wares.

Analysts, in fact, say that the ASP model is ideal for data warehousing, and vendors are jumping into the fray.

A number of established data warehousing companies, such as IBM Corp., Oracle Corp., and SAS Institute Inc., are beginning to offer hosted services.

Likewise, several BI ASPs have emerged in the past couple of years, including Accrue Software Inc., WhiteCross Systems Ltd., WebTrends Corp., and MatchLogic Inc.

Both digiMine and CoRelation declined to comment on financial details.

By: Tom Sullivan

Source: Computer World / PDF

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