SPSS Inc. Forges Alliance With Acxiom

SPSS Inc. and Acxiom have joined forces to create a customer relationship management (CRM) solution by combining the Acxiom Data Network with SPSS Data Mining Technology. Effective immediately, this relationship combines the strength of SPSS' data mining software products with Acxiom's consumer and business marketing data. New versions of SPSS' flagship data mining product will be enabled for the Acxiom Data Networks, a data delivery system that provides access to Acxiom's InfoBase data products. Via the Internet, SPSS users will be able to connect with Acxiom's external marketing data from within the SPSS program. This access will attempt to provides those doing customer analysis and CRM initiatives with valuable insight about customer demographics, behaviors, and buying preferences.

SPSS data mining products are used by thousands of marketers worldwide to discover patterns and trends in large data sets that represent useful decision-making information. This alliance will enable users to more easily perform and apply predictive modeling, statistical analysis, forecasting and trending, segmentation, and data visualization. Users will be able to create more robust and accurate customer models because as they do their analysis they can directly combine their own customer transactional information with demographic and lifestyle information from Acxiom.

The integration of the Acxiom Data Network with SPSS' analytical software will provide demographic and lifestyle profiles of customers in real time. Currently, marketers without access to the Acxiom Data Network have to wait for data to be collected by a third party company, a process that often takes weeks to get results. With the ability to understand customer preferences immediately, organizations can respond quickly to customer trends and competitors' offers while enhancing their one-to-one marketing efforts.

"SPSS is dedicated to finding creative ways of distributing decision-making information throughout an enterprise," said Jack Noonan, president and CEO at SPSS. "With Acxiom and SPSS working together, marketers now have the ability to gain a better understanding of consumer preferences, behavior and trends and to deploy this knowledge across their organizations more quickly. As a result, retailers, financial service centers and e-commerce companies can be more effective in acquiring new customers, retaining the best customers and maximizing customer loyalty and satisfaction."

For more information about SPSS, visit http://www.spss.com.

For more information about Acxiom, visit http://www.acxiomdatanetwork.com.