With the number of dot com companies doubling practically every week, Oracle Corp this week unveiled an initiative to help start ups differentiate their services using Oracle’s data warehousing and analytic software.
Although Oracle is cleverly dressing up the service, called Intelligent Webhouse, as new products, there’s actually nothing new here, although the idea itself is a good one. Rather than collect gigabyte upon gigabyte of data about customers as they come to your web site, Oracle is advising the dot coms to use that information to find out more about their customers buying patterns, their likes and dislikes, and then to feed that back into the web site by giving users a more personalized experience based on his or her shopping history.
Any company of any size can enter the internet market but the key to their success is how they differentiate themselves, says Michael Howard, Oracle’s VP of data warehousing. Howard says this is particularly relevant to the brick and mortar community, which he says is a sweet spot for Oracle. For those traditional brick and mortar businesses moving into the dot com world, they must differentiate themselves from the start. They have to leverage their transactional data or they haven’t got a chance of making it, he said.
The initiative centers around a number of products from within Oracle’s data warehouse, and OLAP analytic lines. At the center is Oracle Express 6.3 OLAP tools, which includes Express Objects, Express Analyzer and Express Web Publisher, tools used by developers to create custom analytical applications. They are designed to work with Express Server which Oracle says has been enhanced to include new editing and debugging capabilities, support for multi-developer applications and a new application packaging and deployment wizard.
For data mining, Oracle will push its Darwin 3.6 suite, which it acquired at the end of June when it purchased Thinking Machines. The tool uses mathematical algorithms to construct predictive models about customer behavior. Oracle says new clustering features enable the tool to work on much larger data sets and the database write-back integration lets you publish those results straight into the database.
XML-based reporting is enabled by using the latest version of Oracle Reports. Release 6i, due in the first quarter of 2000, lets users create customized reports about transactional data on the fly. The reports can then be loaded into a home page or portal site where any user can view them.
For ad hoc querying, Oracle is readying a new beta version of its Discoverer 3i tool, to be released next month, which it says simplifies the query creation process by supplying a wizard to pre-build queries through a web browser. The initiative will also include the customer data quality products gained from Oracle’s acquisition of Carleton Software, earlier this month. The tools use name and address cleansing techniques to enable companies to rationalize their disparate sources of customer data and store a single record for each customer.
