ALTERIAN: UK START-UP COMPANY EXPANDS DATA ANALYSIS SOLUTION TO OFFER POWERFUL DATA MINING CAPABILITIES

Alterian Limited, an innovative UK start-up company, has announced that it has extended its data analysis suite by adding a series of new components that will allow users to automatically mine very large quantities of data. This technology is critical for companies to enable them to take advantage of the information locked in their databases to better understand buying behaviour, assess the effectiveness of marketing campaigns or monitor customer "churn".

The new components integrate CHAID (Chi-squared automatic interaction detection) modelling, a technique which automates the identification of relationships between different factors in a set of data. The output can be in the form of a tree, list of nodes or a gains chart and gives a powerful visual representation of groups and patterns in a company's data.

While many CHAID components only operate on a sample of data, Alterian's CHAID components can be run against huge volumes of data, using the Alterian Nucleus database engine which handles hundreds of millions of records on a PC platform. As a result, customers can automatically analyse all of their available data. rather than just a sample of it, which improves the effectiveness and accuracy of the model.

David Eldridge, managing director, Alterian, commented: "With the growth of marketing techniques such as customer loyalty campaigns, companies need to analyse vast quantities of data to identify meaningful trends and patterns. With the addition of these new CHAID components to our product suite, we can now offer a solution that combines powerful functionality for automated data mining on hundreds of millions of records with data manipulation, analysis and visualisation."

Alterian's product suite comprises Alterian Nucleus, a client/server relational database engine, Alterian Molecule, a data analysis environment, and Alterian Atom, a groupware server. Alterian has integrated Microsoft Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) into its products, enabling its business partners, including Experian and GB, to quickly embed the technology into their own solutions or tailor the products to meet specific customer requirements. The CHAID components can also be customised using Microsoft VBA. This enables business partners to provide customers with easy-to-use business solutions for particular applications.

The components include. a CHAID processing component; a CHAID tree visualisation, component: a gains chart visualisation component. and a node list visualisation component. They are shipped with an example Alterian Molecule report, which demonstrates the use of the components.

About Alterian

Alterian is an innovative company whose new product suite revolutionises the way data is stored, captured, analysed and presented. Alterian technology uniquely allows information to be viewed in every dimension and in minute detail, even down to each individual record. It rapidly handles vast quantities of data at the desktop and can be fully customised to meet customers' specific business requirements. Alterian is based in Bristol in the UK. More information is available at: http://www.alterian.com.