Personify Readies Customer Analysis Product

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January 30, 2001 (6:02 PM EST)

To spot new sales opportunities, a company pursuing e-commerce must have tools for analyzing customer data from websites and other sources.

To meet that need, Personify Inc., San Francisco, plans on Feb. 5 to ship Personify CI, which lets customers store behavioral information from customer relationship management software, e-commerce sites, and data warehouses.

Once gathered in Personify CI -- which stands for customer intelligence -- the information can be examined with analytical and reporting tools to help business managers build campaigns to attract and retain customers most likely to spend money and maximize customers' spending.

Personify's product line, along with those of its competitors like SAS Institute Inc., are targeting the customer relationship analysis (CRA) market.

Personify is different from other CRA vendors in that the company is approaching the market from its expertise in website analysis. Other vendors, such as Oracle Corp. (stock: ORCL) and Hyperion Solutions Corp. (stock: HYSL), are expanding their ERP- and legacy-focused business intelligence tools to the Web.

"They understand websites and they understand segmenting and profiling from the perspective of the Web, which is a different challenge than a lot of companies have had to address before," Hurwitz Group, Framingham, Mass., analyst Jacqueline Sweeney-Coolidge, said. "[Personify] has automated techniques to glean what's important from website data."

Personify's challenge will be in providing easier integration of its new data warehouse and other tools to ERP and legacy systems, Sweeney-Coolidge said.

Corporations could use separate CRA tools for internal systems and for e-commerce data, "but, I think ultimately, everyone wants to see their customers from a holistic view," she said.

Personify CI, which sells for a starting price of $225,000, includes Profile Direct, which automates and synchronizes the exchange of customer profile information between the data warehouse and third-party software, and Personify Site Analytics, which analyzes website traffic. Personify CI also supports third-party OnLine Analytical Processing, or OLAP, tools.

Pre-built connectors to CRM software from Kana Communications Inc. (stock: KANA) and Art Technology Group Inc. (stock: ARTG) are available for Profile Direct.