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If you’re a politician, “staying on message” is said to be one of the more effective tactics for endearing yourself to voters, the theory being that the average American can’t hold more than one idea in his or her head at any given time. Marketing executives, of course, have followed that principle for years — which may say more about politics than it does about our attention spans.
NCR Corp., which only recently recovered from a disastrous acquisition by, and divestment from, AT&T in the mid-1990s — try that for a party trick — appears to be finally reaping the benefits of staying on its particular message. Faced with the inexorable fall of market share in its traditional hardware business, approximately two years ago the company made the wise decision to anoint data warehousing — a category it has dominated at the market’s highest end for some time — as its primary revenue engine for years to come. It’s been harping on the subject ever since, to good effect: In Q1 2000, for example, overall revenue fell slightly, but data warehousing year-over sales leaped by 73 percent. The company now expects total data warehousing revenue to grow by 25 percent this year.
More important, NCR is now among the few companies in the Internet age that can justifiably claim that time is on its side. As contributing editor Richard Winter eloquently explained in a recent Scalable Systems column (“More Than You Hoped For,” April 10, 2000), the transaction has become only the terminus of a much larger, more complex customer record entailing a winding trail of clickstream (and offline) data. The data warehouse, of course, is an ideal means of crystallizing this data for intensive analysis, provided it can handle the terabytes of information that operational systems will fire-hose in its direction — as Teradata has proven it can. Hence, NCR will lie in wait for growing dot-coms to “bump their heads,” and apparently some already have: The company recently announced new contracts with Travelocity.com, ExciteAtHome subsidiary MatchLogic, and E-Trade — the first inroads it has desperately been trying to carve into the New Economy.
It may have been a little slow on the uptake — having been outflanked from below by nimble start ups — but NCR is now also ready to sell its technology into the customer relationship management market. It recently acquired a high-end marketing-automation company, Ceres Integrated Solutions Inc., which will serve as the nucleus of a new CRM division headed by former Ceres president Peter Heffring. Like NCR, Ceres made its bones in retail (the companies share several customers), but the new unit will attempt to span vertical boundaries.
Teradata Solutions Group CTO Stephen Brobst (a former contributing editor to Intelligent Enterprise) told me that Ceres’ flagship product, IOS — a closed-loop targeted marketing package with a sophisticated analytic engine — complements NCR’s “active warehousing” framework, in which software agents (or “event detectives,” in NCR parlance) integrated with Teradata dynamically initiate personalized actions when triggered by customer events such as a wire transfer or recent purchase. In Brobst’s view, the combination of Relationship Optimizer, Teradata V2R4 (to be released in July), and IOS will help companies bridge the gap between today’s customer- centric CRM and tomorrow’s interactive CRM, in which customers and back-end systems interact in near real time through multiple channels. The goal, says Brobst, is a “consistent, one-to-one experience for every customer,” with Teradata serving as the “decision engine” in that experience.
Right Place, Right Time?
In three or four years, after the dot-com “land rush” is over, the survivors will be those that use IT to retain, study, and act on as much customer history as they can. If NCR stays on message, it has a chance to make its solution a leading candidate for the job.
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