Wheelhouse Opens E-Marketing Centers

The rising demand for personalized marketing over the Web has paved the way for Wheelhouse Corp. to expand its marketing infrastructure services business. Wheelhouse has unveiled the first of three planned Applications Management Centers, fiber-linked marketing technology development and staging facilities designed to help clients more efficiently implement Internet marketing campaigns.

At its AMCs, Wheelhouse will develop, test, and deploy client E-marketing campaigns by implementing and integrating applications from software providers such as E.piphany, Vignette, and MicroStrategy. Once these applications are fully tested, they are deployed at clients' sites or third-party hosting facilities. Wheelhouse can continue to remotely monitor and manage the performance of these applications, but it does not do the actual hosting.

The demand for implementing E-marketing applications led Wheelhouse to open its first AMC, in Burlington, Mass., nine months ahead of schedule, says VP Paul McNulty. E-marketing systems integrators and consultants are increasingly in demand as companies alter their marketing messages to accommodate new technology and product acquisitions, he says.

The concept of the development and solution center has worked well for systems integrators building applications in areas other than E-marketing, and Wheelhouse's model could meet with similar success, says Hurwitz Group VP Bill Martorelli. "Such centers reduce the need for IT professionals to travel to multiple locations to work on projects and create synergies that come from working on a project in a single location," Martorelli says.

Pricing for Wheelhouse's E-marketing consulting and implementation services typically starts at $100,000. Pricing for ongoing management of E-marketing implementations through an AMC ranges between $12,000 and $15,000 per month.