New DataMind Corp CEO Gayle Crowell says it’s time for the company to start selling $500,000 applications instead of beating itself up trying to shift a $50,000 tool and is about to roll out a new set of applications for the industry’s new gold rush province, call centers and customer information management systems. Call Point, Web Point and E point – plus Direct Point for use with all three – are designed to enable companies to cross-sell and upsell to different sets of customers identified using the underlying, back-end DataMind engine. DataMind says it’s in discussions with all of the usual suspects in this market – Siebel, Scopus, Chordiant, Vantive and Clarify. After a go- round at selling data mining churn solutions for telcos, reluctant CEO Eric Archambeau went back to VC company, Atlas Ventures and Crowell came on board as new CEO in January. No coincidence there – Crowell hails from customer management call- center company Mosaix Inc where she was SVP. DataMind has struggled to find a way of applying its technology to business – it began life in 1996 touting a $5,000 data mining for the masses package and now finds itself trying to feed at the other end of the trough. It claims advantages over other business intelligence tools such as data marts or OLAP because it can make changes on the fly and process data in real-time as it arrives. It likes to think of its competition as marketing automation companies such as Epiphany, Exchange Applications and Rubric. It’s also got a relationship with Market First which sells an ERP-like solution for non-creative side of marketing. With 45 people and 100 installs it says it will see how the new application suite goes before looking for more venture money.
