SPSS and Ceres Form Strategic Relationship
to Address Analytical Needs of Retail Market
ACTION ITEMS
Retailers will soon have the ability to model their customers and better predict their behavior, thanks to a relationship between SPSS Inc. and Ceres Integrated Solutions. Ceres will incorporate SPSS Components to provide the analytical basis of the automated modeling module within the Ceres Intelligent Operational Systems (Ceres IOS) for Targeted Marketing and Merchandising. On June 15th, Ceres announced that it is partnering with Acxiom Corp. This agreement with SPSS is part of Ceres' overall strategy to incorporate analytical capabilities within the new retail solution.
"We are pleased to be partnering with Ceres and its new venture with Acxiom," said Jack Noonan, SPSS president and CEO. "It represents SPSS' first partnership in the retail market space. This agreement is part of SPSS' strategy to address the needs of vertical markets by partnering with leading companies that have vertical expertise. As a key component of Ceres' automated modeling module, SPSS will provide a system that enables retailers to better understand their customers and predict their behavior."
"SPSS is one of the leading data mining and analytical software providers. Ceres is pleased to welcome them as a part of our enterprise-wide retail solution supporting all areas of the business, from merchants to database marketers," said Peter Heffring, president of Ceres. "The combination of Ceres solutions with SPSS Components will provide a powerful turnkey solution for retailers."
SPSS Components are a set of C++ class libraries which provide application developers with analytical tools that can be easily and deeply integrated in their applications. SPSS Components are based on the analytical procedures within SPSS, an industry-leading software package for desktop data analysis and data mining. Because SPSS Components use the same algorithms as SPSS, developers benefit from the proven reliability of this market-tested code. SPSS Components enable developers to rapidly add analytical capabilities without a separate, special data file type, as is required by most statistical and data mining products.
The Ceres Targeted Marketing Application is an enterprise-wide, highly scaleable marketing application that allows retailers to create marketing campaigns in an integrated environment that closes the loop between marketing analysis and campaign management. The new Automated Modeling component of the Ceres tool will combine statistical algorithms with artificial intelligence technology to allow marketers to automatically generate customized customer response models in a production environment. The component will be available at the end of the fourth quarter of 1998.
SPSS Inc. is a multinational company that delivers reporting, analysis and modeling software products. The company's primary markets are marketing research, business analysis/data mining, scientific research and quality improvement analysis. SPSS products are used at more than 250,000 customer sites around the world in business, academia and government settings. In 1997, SPSS' pivot table technology was added to the Smithsonian Institution's Permanent Research Collection of Information Technology. More information is available on the World Wide Web at http://www.spss.com
Ceres Integrated Solutions ( http://www.ceresios.com ) is a leading provider of Intelligent Operational Software and analytical services for targeting marketing and merchandising for large retailers.