UK massively parallel data mining specialist WhiteCross Systems Ltd seems to have found itself an important niche in the telecommunications industry, with a 1.5m pound contract from Telefonica Argentina, serious interest from major UK and US players, and some impressive-sounding systems in the pipelines. The company, whose systems are currently built round SGS Thomson Microelectronics NV’s Inmos Transputer, claims to differentiate itself from the competition because it built its systems from the bottom up specifically for data mining (CI No 3,104). Future systems currently in development will see the company moving away from the Transputer to commodity chips, but Barfield says they will all be backwards compatible as far as the software is concerned. He says what is unique about WhiteCross is that it has retained all of its original development team, who are now able to apply what they learned about the early architecture to enhance the product, but using cheaper, more powerful commodity chips and architecture. With the new architecture, the company will apparently be able to offer a system with one terrabyte main memory, which Barfield says would enable the real time analysis of call data for a company as large as AT&T Corp. WhiteCross has just sold a WX9020 data exploration system to Telefonica Argentina, one of the largest telecommunications carriers in South America, for high speed analysis of call patterns. The deal was done through its Spanish distributor El Corte Ingles SA, the major Spanish retailer that also owns Spain’s third largest information technology company and has introduced WhiteCross to the South American market. The Telefonica deal is WhiteCross’ second in the region, the first being with Chile’s CTC. WhiteCross chief executive Chris Barfield says the Argentine company is already using the system so extensively that it is looking at the possibility of upgrading its new system in the near future.
$100,000 for two weeks’ work
Barfield says the company is winning by focusing on what he calls ‘business intelligence’, or getting real value out of the data in a company’s data warehouse. Barfield says while WhiteCross does not sell itself as a datawarehouse builder – it usually works along side the traditional warehousers, sucking data out of the warehouse and analyzing it – it often finds that companies end up using WhiteCross’ own database anyway because their datawarehouse projects have either failed, or are not ready on time. To prove its offering would not be just one more overpriced, failed datawarehousing project, WhiteCross last year initiated the WhiteCross Challenge, in which it challenged companies to bring their data to it with a specific problem, for an agreed price, which WhiteCross would refund if it failed to produce the required answers. It is this marketing approach that appears to be paying dividends, and several major US and UK telecoms companies have taken up the challenge, including Sprint Corp, US West Inc, MCI Corp and Mercury Communications Ltd. Barfield says the challenge results speak for themselves, and several companies are likely to buy the full system on the back of it. In addition, the ad-hoc query business that WhiteCross has seen grow as a result of the challenge, with companies paying up to $100,000 for two weeks work because they apparently get the answers they need from their data, is taking on a life of its own. The company has just won a further round of funding to the tune of $10m, to set up ad-hoc bureaux in both the US and the UK. WhiteCross also has a ‘relationship’ with British Telecommunications Plc, which it says is opening doors to business with Telecom partners throughout Europe, and it is in serious talks with Deutsche Telekom AG and a major Scandinavian company. Joanne Wallen
