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VDI concentrates on building applications in the financial industry, and has built an extensive list of high-profile clients there—many of them banks, consultancies, investment brokerages, and stock exchanges. Nasdaq is one such customer; its graphics floating behind TV newscasters’ heads are VDI creations.
Visual Insights, a recent Lucent Technologies spin-off, plans to use the companies’ combined expertise to “accelerate [its] product plans and attain broader market penetration for a new class of e-business focused applications,” according to Sharon Lyons, VP of sales and services. Michael Tatelman, VP of marketing and business development, adds that the company will concern itself with customer relationship management (CRM) issues: “the customer lifecycle (target, acquire, lift, and retain) and the applications such as promotional effectiveness, customer segmentation, cross-sell, churn, and retention.”
Tatelman points to the combination of Visual Insights’ visual discovery and realtime reporting expertise and VDI’s 3D modeling, customers, and personnel as the strength of this union. According to Barry Grushkin, the DSS Lab’s senior researcher and an Intelligent Enterprise contributing editor, VDI’s 3D visualization techniques are indeed unique. And Visual Insights’ Advizor, he says, is the “best” 2D product he’s seen, “great for visual discovery, clean, and easy to use.”
At press time, Tatelman was unable to reveal specific strategies, saying that announcements would begin mid-February and roll out over the next several quarters. (However, he had suggested in a previous conversation with Intelligent Enterprise editors that clickstream analysis would be involved.) He also explains the company is considering partnerships with other organizations — such as CRM leader Siebel Systems Inc. — to enhance customer lifecycle expertise, but has no definite plans.
Mike Schiff, director of data warehousing strategies at analyst organization Current Analysis Inc., says “Visual Insights is certainly not the first visualization company to set its sights on decision support.” He cites Quadstone Inc. and Advanced Visual Systems Inc. (AVS) as companies that have made visualization headway in the CRM realm. According to Schiff, AVS customers have been using the company’s OpenViz tool in tandem with Oracle Express since 1996 to model customer behavior. To what extent this solution will differ from that of Visual Insights-VDI is unclear, but grandness of scope seems to be involved: Advanced visualization techniques, total vertical integration of corporate data, and real-time analysis will all play roles in the merged company’s plan.
None of today’s reporting and analysis tools is sufficiently comprehensive to provide a coherent picture of e-business data (including the customer clickstream), and they don’t share data well enough to contribute to a more comprehensive analysis solution. Clickstream analysis is just the kind of market that’s ripe for visualization tools: The data is copious, constantly increasing, and multidimensional.
The predictive power of massive information can be great, but not if getting a handle on that data is impossible. Visualization can show decision-makers in an instant which dimensions or elements deserve further analysis; coming to the same conclusion with query and analysis methods is not as sure, and certainly not as quick. — Jeanette Burriesci
Continued in News and Analysis Part II >>>
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