IBM DB2 Delivers Real-Time DM Capabilities

IBM announced that it is the first company to provide real-time data mining capabilities as part of the core database.

IBM DB2 Intelligent Miner Scoring allows businesses to make faster decisions and enhance relationships with their customers by driving data mining intelligence to key customer, supplier, and employee information.

For example, a business can rank customers according to a set of pre-determined criteria, making it easier to see what customers fit the definition for being profitable. A company can also use DB2 Intelligent Miner Scoring to search its database to find customers already determined as most likely to purchase a high-end luxury item, and then target that audience with special promotions or targeted advertising.

Industry analysts IDC predict that the business intelligence market will grow to $12.8 billion by 2004 in their report "Information Access Tools Market Forecast and Analysis." According to a recent competitive analysis report issued by Survey.com, "Business Intelligence & Data Warehousing," IBM continued its number one ranking in business intelligence and data warehousing. The report stated that IBM's marketshare was double its closest competitor.

"IBM is leading the movement to bring business intelligence analytics into the database," said Janet Perna, general manager, IBM Data Management Solutions. "With IBM DB2 Intelligent Miner Scoring, it's no longer necessary for a company to designate one power user with an advanced degree to perform analytics. This product puts real-time analytics in the hands of the people on the front lines of CRM applications."

Because IBM DB2 Intelligent Miner Scoring is built as an extender to DB2, it works directly from the relational database, and speeds up the data mining process, resulting in the ability to make quicker decisions from a host of culled data. Additionally, companies no longer have to wait for Oracle to incorporate business intelligence capabilities into their database product since IBM DB2 Intelligent Miner Scoring is also compatible with Oracle databases.

"IBM DB2 Intelligent Miner Scoring is the only product on the market that allows us to implement our vision of full life-cycle model management. We are keenly aware that lift of the Bank's attrition, cross-sell, risk and diminishment models decays with time. IBM DB2 Intelligent Miner Scoring keeps us ahead of the curve," said Dr. Jan Mrazek, senior manager of Business Intelligence Solutions at the Bank of Montreal. "Speed of development, speed of implementation and speed of execution are the keys to getting it right with our customers -- the keys to our success -- and IBM's DB2 Intelligent Miner Scoring is helping us to get there."

The IBM DB2 Intelligent Miner Scoring provides unmatched scalability and power in an easy-to-use and open package. Partners are working with IBM to develop sophisticated, flexible data mining applications that deliver immediate results. Key application developers such as Unica, Xchange, Angoss, the Center for Data Insight, and LogMetrix are using IBM DB2 Intelligent Miner Scoring as the core of their business intelligence. IBM DB2 Intelligent Miner Scoring maintains scalability and ease-of-use by having IBM DB2 as its core platform. Because it is an extender to DB2, it can easily read not only DB2 data, but data running on competitive databases as well.

"More and more of our clients are choosing the IBM platform on which to build their CRM infrastructures," said Andy Frawley, chairman and CEO of Xchange. "While we've always been able to custom-integrate with DB2 Intelligent Miner, IBM's new DB2 Intelligent Miner Scoring technology combined with our marketing automation software will make it much easier for businesses to quickly and easily develop targeted, personalized treatments for customers and prospects. We're pleased to be one of the first marketing automation vendors to support IBM in this endeavor."

DB2 Intelligent Miner Scoring will be made available for general release on March 30, 2001 at a cost of $15,000 per processor, consistent with the pricing of DB2 Universal Database.

Open Standards

In line with the industry's efforts to enhance the exchange of information on the Web with tools like Extensible Markup Language (XML), IBM DB2 Intelligent Miner Scoring takes advantage of the industry standard for predictive modeling, PMML (Predictive Modeling Markup Language), to share data mining predictive models. PMML is an XML-based language that provides applications a vendor-independent method of defining predictive models to eliminate proprietary incompatibilities.

About IBM's DB2 Universal Database

As the foundation for e-business, DB2 Universal Database is the industry's first multimedia, Web-ready relational database management system, strong enough to meet the demands of large corporations and flexible enough to serve medium-sized and small e-businesses. DB2 Universal Database combines integrated power for business intelligence, content management, enterprise information portals and e-business with industry-leading performance and reliability to drive the most demanding industry solutions. DB2 Universal Database together with Internet technology makes information easily accessible, available and secure. There are more than 40 million DB2 users from over 300,000 companies worldwide relying on IBM data management solutions. For more information, please visit www.software.ibm.com/data or www.ibm.com/bi.