Eventricity Lets Banks Buy, Not Build, Event-Based Marketing Systems

As you may recall from my posts on Unica and SAS, event-based marketing (also called behavior identification) seems to be gaining traction at long last. By coincidence, I recently found some notes I made two years about a UK-based firm named eventricity Ltd. This led to a long conversation with eventricity founder Mark Holtom, who turned out to be an industry veteran with background at NCR/Teradata and AIMS Software, where he worked on several of the pioneering projects in the field. Eventricity, launched in 2003, is Holtom’s effort to convert...

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Unica Strategy Stays the Course

I recently caught up with Unica Vice President Andrew Hally as part of my review of developments at the major marketing automation vendors. It’s been a good year for Unica, which will break $100 million in annual revenue for the first time. On the product front, they continue their long-time strategy of offering all the software a marketing department would need. This has mostly meant incremental development of existing components, including continued assimilation of past years’ acquisitions in Web analytics, email, marketing planning, lead...

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Advanced Analytics and Still More Reasons I Love QlikView

I’m at the National Center for Database Marketing Conference this week. NCDM is always a good place to get a feel for what’s on people’s minds. One theme I’ve picked up is a greater interest in advanced analytics. Richard Deere of Direct Data Mining Consultants, a very experienced modeler, told me that interest in segmentation always increases during recessions, because companies are more determined to increase the return on diminished budgets. This is apparently common knowledge in the modeling community, although it was news to me. In any...

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1010data Offers A Powerful Columnar Database

Back in October I wrote here about the resurgent interest in alternatives to standard relational databases for analytical applications. Vendors on my list included Alterian, SmartFocus, Vertica and QD Technology. Most use some form of a columnar structure, meaning data is stored so the system can load only the columns required for a particular query. This reduces the total amount of data read from disk and therefore improves performance. Since a typical analytical query might read only a half-dozen columns out of hundreds or even thousands...

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