InformationWeek
Defining The Business Value Of Technology
November 29, 1999
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Vendor says software will help companies collect and interpret E-commerce information
By Rick Whiting
As companies expand their E-business efforts, they find themselves drowning in data. Business managers need to collect, synthesize, and analyze that information to build customer profiles, improve the personalization capabilities of Web sites, and boost the effectiveness of future sales and marketing campaigns, says Wayne Eckerson, a senior consultant with the Patricia Seybold Group.
SAS joins Broadbase, IBM, net.Genesis, and Oracle in developing business-intelligence products for E-business. Earlier this month, Microsoft unveiled its Business Internet Analytics initiative to develop technology for E-commerce business intelligence.
Web Hound will include the SAS MDDB Server multidimensional database, tools for collecting clickstream data, as well as reporting facilities for organizing the data and building data marts. Web Mining will add SAS's data warehouse administration software to its Enterprise Miner data mining tool and analytical templates designed for Web-site data. The system will let users combine Web-site information with customer and sales data from other sources, says John McIntyre, SAS's global marketing director.
AutoTrader.com Inc., which provides online listings of used cars, has been using SAS MDDB to analyze data generated by its Web site, which receives nearly 3 million visitors per month. The Atlanta company has been advising SAS on the Web Hound/Web Mining development project.
After consolidating the 10 Gbytes to 12 Gbytes of data the AutoTrader.com site generates daily, marketers analyze the information to learn where visitors come from, what ads they view, and what content they read. "That let's us know what kind of content people want to see," says David Lilly, AutoTrader.com's advanced product development VP. "There's a tremendous amount of information that we can use to tune our site."
AS Institute Inc. is developing data collection and data mining software aimed at growing demand for business-intelligence capabilities in E-commerce, the vendor said last week. The products, tentatively named Web Hound and Web Mining, are expected early next year.
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