Blue Martini Expands Data Analysis Capabilities

Blue Martini Software Inc. is boosting the capabilities of its data analysis software. Next week, the supplier of E-commerce applications will ship a new version of the product, accelerating the race among customer-relationship management software vendors to add business-intelligence technology to their product lines.

The new Blue Martini software includes online analytical processing software from ProClarity Corp. for multidimensional analysis. The product's Analysis Center portal now lets users do more interactive analysis rather than only generating static reports as with earlier versions. "Blue Martini's business focus and better apps integration--the portal interface and ability to call models from a call center or the Web--put it near the front of the trend for more actionable analytics," says Erin Kinikin, Giga Information Group analyst. Pricing starts at $70,000 per CPU.

"Customer intelligence is really the next battleground for enterprise customer-relationship management," Kinikin says. Blue Martini's competitors aren't sitting still, however. Last month Siebel Systems Inc. acquired analytics software vendor nQuire Software Inc. PeopleSoft has partnered with data-mining vendor Angoss Software Corp., while SAP made analytics a core of its recent 3.0 CRM release.