Customer Profile System on Offer

A small, privately held UK company has developed a machine capable of analyzing the behavior of millions of consumers, providing managers with hitherto unobtainable competitive marketing information. If developed properly, it could prove to be a key weapon in the fast-growing electronic business world, where retailers and service providers potentially have huge numbers of customers but interact with them only through the internet.

Companies that have used the machine, a parallel computer system developed by WhiteCross Data Exploration, are making claims for its effectiveness.

Cable and Wireless Communications, the UK cable television and telephony group, says it played a part in turning a BP30m ($48M) loss into a BP140m ($224M) pre-tax profit between 1998 and 1999.

The WhiteCross system is a combination of special analytical software and hardware, which lends itself to the marketing needs of telecommunications companies where vast quantities of calling data have to be analyzed.

The system, which costs at least BP250,000 ($400,000) and comprises more than 600 individual processors, is designed for pricing and tariff analysis, customer segmentation and targeting, call profiling and detecting "churn" - customers leaving the network.

WhiteCross is based in Bracknell, with research and development facilities in San Francisco. It was founded in the early 1990s with venture capital from 3i and Abingworth, but was restructured in 1995 when Geoffrey Squire took over as chairman. The company had sales of about BP5m ($8M) this year. This is expected to rise to more than BP30m by 2001, when the company should make its first pre-tax profit.