DIGITAL ARCHAEOLOGY ANNOUNCES C-DISCOVERY - THE FIRST WEB-BASED APPLICATION FOR CUSTOMER-CENTRIC ANALYSIS THAT KEEPS PACE WITH THE SPEED OF BUSINESS
Building on its leadership in Flexible Knowledge Manufacturing, Digital Archaeology Corporation has announced c-Discovery, a complete software solution for marketing departments and other business users that provides "instant" access to data across all customer touchpoints.
c-Discovery employs a powerful and easy-to-use analysis interface that can be implemented in days, instead of the many months required of traditional "hard-coded" vendor applications. c-Discovery instantly links e-commerce and Web site related data with customer information from "bricks and mortar" sources, front office and back office applications and external data sources. Thus, the business is provided with a more complete view of customer behavior, allowing it to maximize customer value and enhance business performance. In a separate announcement, the Company also announced the release of version 2.0 of its critically acclaimed Digital Archaeology Discovery Suite analytical application development platform.
Key benefits of the c-Discovery solution include the ability for businesses to implement, within days, a fully integrated view of customer behavior, product performance, and profitability across all channels, including e-commerce, and the ability to rapidly deploy highly customized reporting and "DrillAnywhere" customer analysis capabilities to hundreds of corporate users over the Web. In addition, the application provides the ability to accommodate new sources of internal or external data "instantly" and allows new questions to be asked for just-in-time decision support.
The announcement of Digital Archaeology's c-Discovery follows recent customer wins at NetSales, UMB Bank, xpedx and RTCdirect. Frank Hightower, Senior Vice President of RTCdirect, the relationship marketing specialist of WPP Group, one of the world's largest advertising networks, stated, "c-Discovery enables RTCdirect analysts to deliver unique insights into customer behavior and profitability for the benefit of its clients at breakthrough speed. The ability to rapidly "load" new data sources without concern for data types or structures, and to ask new questions of the data, combine to create, in my mind, the most flexible and adaptive customer analysis software on the market today."
NetSales, Inc., one of the oldest and most trusted providers of customized, full-service e-commerce solutions that enable companies to establish successful commerce Web sites, has enabled more than 1,500 companies to increase sales, gain marketshare, and supplement existing sales channels through e-commerce. Corrine Smith, NetSales Vice President of Marketing, says, "We are really excited about the c-Discovery solution's ability to integrate data from our clients' brick and mortar operations with our e-commerce log files and customer transaction data. The information will give NetSales the unparalleled ability to identify and analyze shopper behavior and buying patterns, which will be invaluable as we implement new, integrated marketing initiatives to help our clients achieve e-business success. We are especially excited about Digital Archaeology's ability to rapidly deploy distributed analysis of customer behavior to our clients via the Web."
c-Discovery is based on the Digital Archaeology Discovery Suite, the company's adaptive application development platform first introduced in December 1998, which enables analytic applications to be deployed in days, versus many months. In addition, Discovery Suite-based solutions adapt dynamically to the changing needs of the business user and are self-optimizing - there is no need for ongoing performance tuning, thereby dramatically reducing maintenance requirements. "From set-up to delivered solution, we believe there is no faster or easier way for a business user to gather and convert raw customer data into actionable knowledge," said David Frankland, President and Chief Executive Officer of Digital Archaeology.
"This is particularly important in today's dynamic global economy, as time-to-market becomes an increasingly critical competitive component and the ability to identify, understand and target ever-smaller consumer segments can be the key to winning in the marketplace," Mr. Frankland added. "Customer behavior has never been more dynamic. As a result, traditional software architectures are ill suited for today's customer information needs because they provide static solutions to dynamic problems. c-Discovery provides marketers and other business users an adaptive, total view solution of their customers that keeps pace with the speed of business, thereby allowing them to react just in time to market needs and competitive pressures."
c-Discovery integrates disparate customer transaction, product, and channel data sources, including e-commerce data, "instantly." Employing a series of pre-built analyses, the business user can perform detailed customer analysis such as customer segmentation, lifetime value, RFM, product association and market basket analysis. The analysis can be highly customized to reflect business rules unique to a particular corporate environment and, once implemented, can be easily changed should the business rules change.
Reflecting the reality of a rapidly changing business environment, c-Discovery can accommodate new, unanticipated data sources or marketing questions "on the fly" without requiring additional IT resources for reprogramming. Specific to e-commerce customer interactions, c-Discovery can analyze log file data and create behavioral profiles of "shoppers" and "buyers" in support of detailed click-through analysis. Given the infancy of e-commerce, analytic applications that are built on "hard-coded" algorithms and static business rules are incapable of rapidly integrating new approaches to analyze and gain actionable insight from this dynamic and rapidly evolving wealth of customer data.
An adaptive Web interface permits "DrillAnywhere" analysis and enterprise-wide customer-centric reporting. As a result, hundreds of corporate users can quickly and efficiently access and analyze comprehensive customer and market data - even on an ad hoc, "on the fly" basis - to identify and better understand opportunities, answer questions, solve problems, support decisions and seek competitive advantage in the marketplace.
With the c-Discovery application, marketers and other business users are able to quickly and easily address such key questions as:
c-Discovery is available immediately for Microsoft Windows NT and the Sun/Solaris 2.6 Unix platforms. A Linux version is planned for release later this year. Pricing is based on concurrent use and starts at $130,000 for Windows NT and $170,000 for Unix platforms.
Digital Archaeology Corporation, a privately held company based in Lenexa, Kansas, created X-Set, a patent-pending architecture to help businesses radically simplify and speed up the process of transforming data into knowledge. The company's revolutionary application development platform, the Digital Archaeology Discovery Suite, reduces, from many months to a matter of days, the time it takes to implement adaptive analytic applications. Once implemented, Discovery Suite applications accept new sources of data without the need to redefine data structures, enabling users to quickly answer questions not originally contemplated. The company refers to this breakthrough capability as Flexible Knowledge Manufacturing. With the introduction of c-Discovery, Digital Archaeology provides marketers with the ability to perform dynamic, "just-in-time" customer analysis across all customer touchpoints and deploy the solution in client-server environments or through an adaptive business information portal.
For more information about Digital Archaeology's breakthrough new X-Set technology, the Discovery Suite Analytic Application Platform, or the c-Discovery software solution, contact Digital Archaeology at 913/438-3777 or visit the company's Web site at http://www.digarch.com.