NCR launches customised marketing solution

NCR has launched its first one-stop marketing solution, enabling companies to specifically tailor their marketing activities to key customers.

The Customer Relationship Management (CRM) programme, announced in Prague today, is based around the company's Teradata data warehouse engine, set to migrate to NT, and also comprises server platforms, partner tools and a suite of software services.

It allows for one-to-one marketing to individual customers, using a combination of data warehousing technology and database marketing techniques, and will "fundamentally change the way enterprises interact with customers", according to Dan Harrington, vice president for data warehouse marketing at NCR's computer systems group.

The company plans to acquire software companies specialising in data warehousing to expand and develop the service.

"We will be making acquisitions to expand on niche areas as there are a number of small companies springing into the data warehousing arena," said VP William Eisenman.

"We currently dominate the top $3 billion sector of the data warehouse market, which is worth $12-14 billion overall. And these new products will allow us to dominate a bigger than 25 per cent share of that market," said Harrington.

"The programme allows you to identify the customers who are likely to leave, so you can go through the procedures to try to retain them before they do," said Dr Tony Barrese, VP and general manager of the communications systems division. "Similarly, customers who have a propensity to purchase is another very important knowledge to develop up front, because not all customers are."

It will principally address the following four key areas - customer segmentation, market planning, customer communications and analysis and refinement.

"The increased bandwidth, and intelligent networks are driving regulatory environments around the world to growth, creating an environment of great opportunities as well as threat," said Barrese.

Teradata will shortly be moved to NT, following other attempts to migrate it away from its proprietary origins.

Harrington said: "I've been associated with this for 10 years, and for 10 years I've been trying to get it off proprietary. We tried putting it to Unix but it was too complicated so we moved it to NT. We plan to move it to multiple platforms, so we will not be proprietary for any longer than we have to."