Relationships beyond customer relationships

By Barney Beal, News Editor 19 Apr 2005 | SearchCRM.com

Digg This!     StumbleUpon     Del.icio.us

The customer data integration (CDI) market continues to explode, and businesses investing in the software might want to consider managing hierarchies across multiple systems and data sources.

"It's a critical functionality," said Aaron Zornes, chief research officer of the CDI Institute, a San Francisco-based consultancy. "The data model is everything. You can't just model the relationship between you and your customers or suppliers. Your customers have a lot of relationships."

CDI systems need to integrate not just customer-level data, but the hierarchy, or higher-level relationships, data systems have with one another.

Householding, the process of determining the relationships and purchasing history of people within one residence, demands a sophisticated hierarchy, Zornes said. For example, householding in an insurance company would allow an account manager to view all relationships for multiple members of a household across different policies and claims. Householding has an equivalent in the business world: One company can have multiple subsidiaries and offices across multiple continents.

"It's very hard to unravel the relationships," Zornes said. "This is the whole concept of hierarchy management. There's lots of discrete data, but what's interesting is customers' relationship with you and other customers or people who aren't your customers."

On Monday, Siperian Corp., of San Mateo, Calif., released its Hierarchy Manager, a complement to its Master Reference Manager (MRM), to help companies solve the customer relationship problem. The Hierarchy Manager leverages customer meta data into the MRM and provides consolidated relationship data for multiple applications.

The tool was built after Siperian discovered many of its customers were custom developing their own tool for managing the hierarchy of data, said CEO Darlene Mann.

Pharmaceuticals is one industry that has discovered a need for hierarchy management, with purchasing organizations such as hospitals and pharmacies banding together to purchase drugs at a discount.

"Keeping track of how they relate back to one another is one of the big challenges in pharmaceutical contract management," Mann said. "There are more regulatory pressures to explain the pricing of pharmaceuticals. It's important to track how those companies are interrelated and who is getting what pricing and why."

The high-tech and media industries are joining insurance and pharmaceuticals in investing in CDI, and it's beginning to show. According to the CDI Institute, the overall market for CDI software and integration services grew 36% from 2003 to 2004, and will reach the $1 billion mark by 2008.

Established business application vendors like Siebel Systems Inc., SAP AG and Oracle Corp. have already started chasing the market with their own offerings, as have best-of-breed vendors like DWL Inc., Initiate Systems Inc. and Siperian. Over 75% of the technology professionals who participated in a recent CDI Institute survey said they are considering purchases outside the family of the business application platforms like SAP, Oracle and Siebel.

Yet Siperian believes its competitive advantage lies in the data model.

"Almost all of our customers have Siebel or one of the other major CRM offerings," Mann said. "Even if you do have packaged applications, it's heterogeneous. Companies usually have some Oracle, some SAP and some Siebel. When you pull it all together, they don't conform to the same data model. [The business application vendors] represent their CDI solutions with the data model they use for their apps. That means you're trying to get Siebel to fit into Oracle's model."

Siperian's Hierarchy Manager is a component within the Siperian Hub and can be purchased in addition to its MRM tool.

Tags: Customer data integration software,  Business intelligence, CRM and CDI,  VIEW ALL TAGS

Digg This!     StumbleUpon     Del.icio.us

RELATED CONTENT Customer data integration software Six criteria for master data management (MDM) tool evaluation What's the cost of developing PIM software internally vs. externally? Top 13 master data management (MDM) buzzwords and definitions Evaluating and selecting a master data management (MDM) vendor MDM vendors improve data quality, stewardship, according to Gartner Tips for planning a data governance strategy and MDM strategy In customer data integration, is a "customer" always an individual? EMR systems bring need for data integration, data quality into focus What is driving MDM investments in the current economy? Designing the MDM team for an SAP MDM implementation project Business intelligence, CRM and CDI The best practices in customer intelligence XO gives a CDI initiative the kiss of success The right mix of BI and CRM analytics Gartner sizes up CDI field CDI: The missing piece to the CRM puzzle Giving your customers a load of BI Customer intelligence – the next generation Put your faith in CRM's data stewards How is BI different from CRM?

RELATED RESOURCES 2020software.com, trial software downloads for accounting software, ERP software, CRM software and business software systems Search Bitpipe.com for the latest white papers and business webcasts Whatis.com, the online computer dictionary