By William Fellows
Data mart company Digital Archaeology Corp is extending its footprint into customer information analysis and management with a new set of pre-built application templates called C-Discovery that can perform query and analysis on customer activity. It’s geared towards slicing and dicing e-commerce data for patterns in customer behavior that can be used in new marketing and product campaigns.
The company says its advantage over other customer information analysis companies such as Epiphany and Broadbase is that the templates are not hard-coded and that customers can create their own types of query and analysis metrics.
The new application run atop the company’s only Discovery Suite of analytical applications and database tools that include traditional data loading, cleansing and repository functions drawing from relational databases. It claims it can uniquely join different kinds of data sets via its flexible X-Set architecture. Customers, it says, do not have to predefine their answers as they do with conventional decision support tools which require the user to establish data structures before performing queries. X-Set allows data sets to be loaded and queried before structuring it. Digital Archaeology says founder Michael Forster came up with X-Set by extending classical set theory.
The company is now offering a Unix version of its currently Windows NT Discovery Suite. It has also added new scheduling functions to it that refresh the data sources used by its reporting application, now also fitted with HTML capability. A new web client enables users to access data and perform queries from any browser. There are query tools, a web-based query system, a report server and data transformation tools it calls Digital Excavator enabling users to use the database as the basis of large-scale data warehouses. Prices for start at $85,000 on NT, $120,000 on Unix. A Linux version is due later this year. C- Discovery costs from $130,000 on NT and $170,000 on Unix.
Digital Archaeology shipped its 1.0 product at the beginning of this year but declines to say how many customers it has won. The 50-person company is currently raising a third round of venture funding and is capitalized at $8.5m from two previous rounds.
