In one of my previous posts I briefly mentioned the possibility of integrating the data received from CDYNE Demographics web service with your customer database and thus extending your customer information. Well, this is now officially possible with CDYNE Demographics connector for the Apatar Open Source Data Integration toolset. The new connector delivers statistical data about customers and allows organizations to identify the ethnic and socio-economic makeup of their current customer base or purchased marketing lists. Aside from that, the connector can be used with any contacts database to determine the age, race, income, as well as type of residence, median income, median house value, or median number of vehicles, all without coding.

Ideal for data modeling and marketing
Whether you need to build customized marketing campaigns and determine ethnic or socio-economic information, this new data quality service from Apatar and CDYNE can be used to tweak your product offerings or advertising messages to reach your desired target market. Non-profit organizations or companies relying on donor support can use this data to match other groups or geographic areas to these traits in order to expand membership base and increase donations and support.

The CDYNE Demographics Web service can help companies better select target groups and learn more about their customers. With Apatar’s visual drag-and-drop interface, this source of useful socio-economic information can be integrated with your database or CRM system in minutes.

You can learn more over here.

There’s been a growth in user-generated content lately, where you have loads of information on your clients scattered all over different resources and it’s next to impossible to have it all in one place and look at it from a bird’s view. Well, what’s the point of trying to unify all this information on your own? What if it’s incomplete and redundant? However if you think of services like CDYNE Demographics that gather statistical data on your customers and provide you with a whole set of information that you can use in your marketing, it’s obvious that this problem is already being taken care of. You don’t need to look for that data in different Web sources. If tools like that are used wisely and integrated into your customer CRM (the type of integration Apatar will be offering shortly) this unstructured user data can become a global value for your company’s growth.

Apatar CEO Renat Khasanshyn is currently attending Interop-Software 2008 data integration conference in Las Vegas, NV. Hope you get a chance to meet him in person, if you happen to be there at the same time. If not, you can always check out Renat’s impressions of the conference in his blog.

And if you didn’t get to visit this Interop, you are just in time to register for the next one in Tokyo, Japan on 9-13 of June this year.

SugarCRM launches new capabilities.

SugarCRM Inc., the world’s leading provider of commercial open source customer relationship management (CRM) software, announced the beta release of new reporting and wireless capabilities for SugarCRM. The new reporting and analytics engine provides SugarCRM users with improved insight into sales effectiveness and customer behavior. Revamped wireless capabilities deliver the feature-rich SugarCRM user experience on mobile phones, including support for the popular BlackBerry^® and iPhone mobile handsets.

Support for iPhone, huh? I can see a tendency… Everything and everyone goes “i” and mobile. Which isn’t bad, actually. The new wireless features include:

• Improved User Interface provides navigation into edit, detail, and list views, as well as the ability to access employee directory, store preferences and view recent items.
• Rich HTML Client delivers rich presentation of SugarCRM data through a standard Web browser.
• Device Independent allows users to view SugarCRM data from any PDA or smart phone, including the BlackBerry and iPhone.
• New Search Capabilities allow users to find information quickly with the press of a few buttons.

Come to think of it, with SugarCRM going wireless, and with Apatar  SugarCRM connector installed you can now have any of your database (SQL, Oracle) data up in SugarCRM and on your mobile device in practically no time. I love this integrated world!

Any You Tube fans here? Did you ever want to have all the information on Most Viewed You Tube videos in one place on your computer? Guess what? Videos, titles, descriptions, links, tags can all be automatically updated in your local .csv file. You only need to configure Apatar settings once and from then on all you’ll have to do in order to see what’s new and Most Viewed on YouTube is open the file.

This is what it’ll take:

More over here.

We all know that the combination of contact data from many sources introduces myriad opportunities for error. There’s this bulk of databases with data entered by different people (and humans are prone to error, right?) at different time… and you have to trust all of it is correct and still up to date? Auch. Checking the validity by hit-and-miss method? Auch. Tired of dialing phone numbers from your CRM and hearing that you’ve got wrong number?

Well, you don’t really have to anymore. New CDYNE Phone Verification connector for Apatar data integration toolset can automatically verify and filter customer phone numbers before they enter CRM applications for you. And it doesn’t matter where your data came from, whether it’s databases (such as MySQL, Microsoft SQL, Oracle), files (Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, CSV/TXT files), applications (Salesforce.com, SugarCRM), or the top Web 2.0 destinations (Flickr, Amazon S3, RSS feeds).

This service identifies the phone numbers in your list that have new area codes following a NANPA split and replaces incorrect area codes. If the area code is incorrect or missing, Phone Verification can be used to identify the error or return the corrected one to update your data.

William Chenoweth, VP Director of Marketing CDYNE Corporation says:

“This new Apatar Connector provides customers the ability to automate their every day data management duties with scheduling features and visual drag-and-drop interface. The more automated the data cleansing process, the less expensive and more consistent the end result will be for your company.”

There’s more over here.

Most SaaS providers will be relying on open source within two years, according to the recent Gartner research.

No wonder, open source significantly cuts costs for SaaS vendors, although not for the users. The cost cuts are likely to “be used to increase profitability or invested in research and development.”

Open source will be used in the operating system, application server of at a database level and will make up 30 per cent of an application, said Gartner.

Robert DeSisto, vice president at Gartner, said: “The more SaaS vendors use open source in the technology stack, the lower their software acquisition cost becomes.”

Another factor in favor for SaaS expansion is the recent economic downturn, which directs users to a lower risk and costs solutions (provided by the SaaS market).

Well, that only makes SaaS vendors, like Salesforce.com (uses an open source database), Apatar (open source data integration provider), that have already adopted open source to a certain extent way ahead of the rest of the software market.

News from here, emphasis mine.

RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK, N.C.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–StrikeIron, Inc., the leader in providing innovative solutions for delivering data over the Internet, today announced that David Linthicum will take the helm as company CEO. Linthicum will be responsible for continuing to drive the company’s leadership position as the frontrunner in delivering critical Web services and data, on demand, for the emerging next-generation Internet. Bob Brauer remains as president and co-founder and will continue to lead the day-to-day operations of StrikeIron.

“StrikeIron’s revenue more than doubled from Q107 to Q108 and has tremendous momentum in the industry. We’re moving beyond simply delivering data as a service and into a new era of growth and development for new innovative products,” stated Brauer. “As an industry thought leader and visionary, Dave’s addition to the StrikeIron team helps us take the appropriate steps to deliver on the promise of Service Oriented Architecture via the Web and building the foundation for Web 2.0 applications with our managed Web services platform. We are confident that under Dave’s leadership, StrikeIron is well-positioned to go to the next level.”

“The emerging Web is an exciting medium that has come of age. Web services and mashups are changing how we access and deliver information and StrikeIron has established themselves as one of the driving forces in the industry,” stated Linthicum. “I look forward to building on the success StrikeIron has already achieved to date.”

A quick reminder - as a result of a recent partnership agreement with StrikeIron, Apatar has recently released two connectors to StrikeIron’s data quality services: StrikeIron US Address Verification connector and StrikeIron E-mail Verification connector. These data quality services from Apatar and StrkireIron ensure the validity of your data, increase productivity, improve sales strategies, and take customer service to a new level by providing faster transaction processing and higher accuracy.

The questions have been up lately on whether the term Business Intelligence has outlived its practical side and whether Business Analytics is a more appropriate term. The opinions regarding the relationship of BI and BA split. Some say Business Analytics makes up just one part of, or a niche within this large concept of Business Intelligence. Others consider BI too vague of a term and feel more comfortable with Business Analytics as a definition for the new sophisticated data quality, data integration and etl tools.

The proponents of the second “theory” say Business Intelligence is changing the way businesses work and think. Bi here implies not only moving data around and producing reporting services, but also keeping pace with the constantly changing and dynamic business requirements.

So, what is analytics? Neil Raden of Hired Brains, a market research and management consulting firm, has said that, “the proper term for interacting with information at the speed of business, analyzing and discovering and following through with the appropriate action, is ‘analytics’.”

Well, the opinions may differ, but regardless of what you call it, be it Business Intelligence or Business Analytics, the data quality services Apatar provides play an integral role in interacting with information, merging, transfering and validating it - everything that both BI and BA are all about.

Take a look at how its data quality services can validate and improve your customer data and get it clean and easy to work with. Or browse data quality web demo over here.