WhiteCross, MRJ Technology Solutions Team
To Build Data Mining Laboratory
ACTION ITEMS
WhiteCross Systems and MRJ Technology Solutions, two leaders in the field of data mining, exploration, and decision support, announced they have agreed to create a Data Exploration and Mining Center. The Center will combine WhiteCross' massively parallel processing (MPP) data exploration server and HeatSeeker data mining software with MRJ's expertise in applying a full range of techniques for mining and analyzing very large databases (VLDBs) for hidden information.
The Data Exploration and Mining Center, to be built at MRJ's Fairfax, Virginia headquarters, will provide client organizations with the insights they need to identify their most profitable customers and markets, in addition to risk assessment, customer retention, cross-selling, health care analysis, and fraud detection. The center will empower clients to use MRJ's and WhiteCross' expertise to their advantage, without requiring them to make the large money and time investments needed to build a similar system in-house.
WhiteCross will provide MRJ with a 650-node database super computer, capable of analyzing over 100 million rows of data per second. One result is that the WhiteCross/MRJ solution will produce meaningful answers to a wide range of complex queries and data mining analysis in real-time; taking only seconds or minutes to produce data exploration insights which have traditionally taken hours, days or even weeks.
Time spent transforming data from legacy sources, auditing, and cleansing it will be minimized by the capabilities and speed of the WhiteCross technology.
The Center is aimed at providing answers to companies and government agencies in the fields of telecommunications, banking, retail, utilities, health care, intelligence, analysis, and law enforcement. A number of leading corporations have already committed to use the Center, including Sprint, MCI, Mercury, and EBS.
"The laboratory concept leverages WhiteCross' powerful MPP-based database server, HeatSeeker data mining software, and MRI's data mining expertise to create a powerful selling proposition," said Henry Morris, Program Director, Data Warehousing and Information Access, International Data Corporation. "It offers organizations a unique opportunity to test the system's capabilities with their actual data in order to solve a business problem. The power of the WhiteCross solution lies in enabling organizations to achieve results faster based on an analysis of the full volume of data rather than a sampling," Morris commented.
"WhiteCross has successfully demonstrated the worth of an outsource data mining lab in Europe," said Jim Suszka, WhiteCross Vice President, U.S. Operations. "Companies appreciate the value they receive from discovering true business insights from their volumes of detailed data. They also appreciate the fixed-cost advantage our solution brings, since we are able to clearly identify significant opportunities and provide them with a substantial return on their investment," he added.
WhiteCross Systems Inc. helps organizations derive real value from large amounts of data through its products and service offerings. Recent solutions completed on behalf of its clients include areas such as:
META Group Vice-President Aaron Zornes said the WhiteCross/MRJ venture is another sign that companies are looking beyond enterprise data warehousing to projects which use data exploration and mining techniques to quickly identify real business opportunities at reduced costs.
Zornes added that WhiteCross and MRJ share META's vision of secondgeneration data mining tools, which provide companies with the ability to:
WhiteCross, http://www.whitecross.com , founded to develop massive parallel data exploration systems in the early 1990s, its objective is to develop and bring to market an integrated system for ultra-fast manipulation of large relational databases.
WhiteCross markets an enterprise data exploration system, the WX9020, and a departmental one, the WX9010. The systems scan millions of records per second: This is many orders of magnitude greater than market-leading general purpose relational database management systems running on the latest parallel hardware. The product is complemented by expert WhiteCross consultancy and data mining products which helps customers identify and realize the full potential of their collected data.
WhiteCross has customers in Europe, North and South America, Australia, and Asia, in the retail, telecommunications, financial services and utilities sectors.
MRJ Technology Solutions, http://www.mrj.com , is an employee-owned, information systems and engineering services company with annual revenues exceeding $125 million. It has sustained an annual growth rate of 25% since its inception in 1978. MRJ's team of professionals provides customers with advanced solutions in high-performance computing, network solutions, training, and simulation, engineering services, and data warehousing and data mining.
MRJ began its involvement in data warehousing in 1986 by building massively parallel applications for the FBI, Department of Defense, and American Express; many of those applications are still in operation today. Howard Richmond of the Gartner Group has described MRJ as one of the few systems integrators who "have the critical mass of people necessary to implement Parallel Computing solutions."