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Exploring the cyber frontier
On the following pages, three leading Internet businesses share some of the keys to their success.
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Travelocity
Travelocity handles a move toward an active data warehouse with aplomb and finds that a collaborative effort between business and IT can lead to success.
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Network Solutions
Network Solutions is committed to putting data to work in order to maintain a constant, careful focus on its customers while simultaneously broadening its services.
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Overstock.com
Overstock.com embraces an ambitious enterprise data warehouse implementation, adopting new technologies that transform supply chain and inventory management to maintain the company's steady growth.
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Making the most of the Web
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Making the most of the Web
The growing amount of data from online businesses requires a flexible solution.
by Keith Ferrell
Buying. Selling. Browsing. Clicking. This is the lifeblood of Internet-based businesses, but it adds up to one thing: Detailed data, and lots of it. Each click of the mouse signals a customer's preference, and that must be recorded. A business must know how to leverage this massive amount of data in order to chart a course for its next steps.
Travelocity, Network Solutions and Overstock.com have developed ways to collect, analyze and store data in ways that help them move beyond mere solvency to sustained growth and industry dominance. With the help of Teradata solutions, an enterprise can reach beyond the predictable and achieve growth it never dreamed of.
The need for tools dealing with the volume of data—and determining how much of it is real information—has grown during the recent resurgence in e-business.
Teradata was prepared for that resurgence, despite a decline several years ago in Internet commerce. "We kept our e-business skill sets and applications strong" during that decline, says James Semenak, Teradata's director of media entertainment and e-business consulting. "About two years ago we saw the industry survivors making a come back and starting to spend on technology again." The decline reversed itself, and now the need for data-management tools is stronger than ever.
The skill sets and applications important to online businesses include everything a bricks-and-mortar retailer would require—and then some.
"Internet-based businesses have all of the demands and needs of any business," says Caroline Smith, Teradata senior solutions architect for travel and transportation, "with the added advantage that they can actually see the customer as he moves through a Web site, watch what pages he stays at longer than others, find where he's having problems or receiving error messages."
That added information enhances the customer relationship in numerous ways. With more information available about customers, a business can better learn what each wants and needs. Of course, the nature of the business medium brings its own business requirements.
"The transaction applications that capture online information produce relatively clean data," Smith says. "But Web servers are notorious for throwing garbage into Web logs. Data from Web servers tends to be very dirty; it has to be interrogated extensively."
This, from her perspective, is another key value Teradata brings to the table. "We know how to collect the data, how to integrate it and how to clean it. Data warehousing is what we do, which sets us apart from many people in the business. Many products are about reporting—ours are about collecting data and extracting information that helps people run their businesses better."
Semenak agrees. "We've continued to monitor and learn as e-business evolves," he says. "We understand the various business models, the different types of data, the elements that compose doing business online."
Among the lessons learned and put to work is an understanding of the deepness of the online customer's relationship with the e-business—or a traditional business that cultivates online transactions and relationships.
"Online channels are the richest interaction channel a business can have with customers or prospects," Semenak says. "Not only that—it's the least expensive."
Call centers, he points out, are motivated to close conversations as quickly as possible because of the inherent costs of staffing a call center. "But an online visit delivers not only lower cost but also a far deeper set of potential interactions, all of them generating rich information that's added to the customer's profile, available to be shared with other operations within the company," Semenak says.
The real-time nature of those interactions, the wealth of data embedded in them, the ongoing histories that are generated all benefit from the real-time, single view of the customer that the enterprise data warehouse provides. T
© Teradata Magazine-March 2006
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