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Customer Data Integration: Ten Questions With Anurag Wadehra of SiperianCatching up with the VP of Marketing and Product Management at Siperian.
By DAVID SIMS
TMCnet CRM Alert Columnist
Hi Anurag, thanks for taking the time with us. What exactly is Customer Data Integration?
Customer Data Integration, or CDI as it is often referred to, is a new software category which combines the necessary technology, processes and services needed to create and maintain an accurate, timely and complete view of a customer.
Sounds like the Holy Grail. How does it differ from other technologies, such as Extract-Transform-Load, Enterprise Information Integration or, say, Data Quality initiatives? Over the past several years, companies have turned to EII, ETL and DQ technologies in the hopes of addressing their customer data integration issues. Unfortunately, these are limited set of tools, each of which originated for narrow purposes. Each one compliments the CDI platform or framework but none replace it – ETL moves large volumes of data in batch-mode and is still needed as step in building a CDI hub; EII was designed to run distributed queries across disparate sources in real-time and can be used alongside CDI for data aggregation; and finally DQ tools were designed to de-duplicate and “scrub” incorrect names and addresses one source at a time and still need to be integrated with a CDI hub.
What’s the best music to listen to at work?
Silence is golden! Otherwise, my preference shall be Indian classical ragas based on the time of the day.
First CoffeeSM’ll stick to Frank Sinatra. Obviously CDI would be a plus to any CRM initiative, but what are the industry verticals you see that take it the most seriously and really invest in CDI?
We are seeing a lot of interest in health and life sciences, financial services, insurance, telecommunications and high tech industries. The federal government is yet another area where there is a clear need for this type of data integration – but in this case the customer is a citizen, a constituent or an employee.
First CoffeeSM isn’t much of a techie, but understands that Siperian develops their CDI products based on the Adaptive Transaction hub style. What’s the business reason there?
We obviously think this approach is the most suitable for today’s changing business and IT environments. The Adaptive Transaction hub style, like the one we offer, emerged most recently to address the limitations of the other CDI approaches. With the adaptive style, this type of hub is built as a platform for consolidating data from disparate third party and internal sources and for serving unified customer views to operational applications, analytical systems or both. Unlike other styles, this hub is data-model-neutral and uses templates, is tailored to meet the needs of each industry, and allows enterprise-specific data models to be implemented quickly. In effect this type of hub becomes the customer master or “system-of-record” for all systems.
What are the ROI metrics a company should look for with CDI?
The ROI metrics differ not only industry but by the specific business processes within each vertical. The most common ROI metrics are in three categories: acquiring the customer (such as improving cost efficiency of marketing programs, reducing cost of sales in pharmaceutical companies, etc), serving the customer (cost & efficacy of strategic account management in banking, cost of generating quotes in insurance) and ensuring compliance (such as FDA, CAN-SPAM, Know Your Customer, etc. kind of initiatives). CDI as an infrastructure enables these benefits that unlock the ROI.
Why do you think there’s interest in Customer Data Integration?
CDI initially gained in popularity because it finally fulfills the unmet promise of customer relationship management and business intelligence applications – achieving a unified view of a customer across touch points in real-time. And, what is even more important is that CDI allows companies to manage their most valuable information asset which of course is customer data. By leveraging a CDI solution, organizations can rapidly respond to changes in customer data – such as address update – across business processes which in turn results in more efficient and profitable customer interactions, reduced customer operations costs and increased accuracy of their regulatory compliance initiatives.
Customer Data Integration tools have been in the spotlight recently as a result of IBM’s recent acquisition of another CDI vendor DWL. Are you concerned about the consequences of this new alliance and what do you think it means for CDI vendors like yours?
We see this acquisition as a good thing. Not only does this deal underscore the importance of the customer data integration hub, it proves there are a lot of major deals out there. As a leading best of breed vendor, Siperian continues to be in a great position to grow rapidly and partner with leading players which, by the way, includes IBM for us.
There are several CDI hub styles available. What are the business reasons companies would use to determine which style is right for them?
Today, the CDI market is attracting several technology vendors from areas like ERP, CRM, data quality, and master data management. As a result there is a mixed-bag of CDI approaches. The first is to build a custom-built data hub using the ETL and DQ tools we discussed earlier. The second is to settle on a fixed transaction hub like the ones offered by DWL, Siebel and Oracle which are built on a comprehensive but fixed data model and developed to support a specific set of applications. The third is to choose a registry style customer hub that only contains “links” to matched records across multiple data sources. The last alternative is to choose a style that locks you into none of the above three styles, namely, an adaptive transaction hub. This is a real-time hub with an application vendor-neutral data model that delivers a reliable, persistent foundation of master reference and relationship data, along with all the history and lineage of data changes needed for audit and compliance tracking. This hub cab also aggregate unified customer views dynamically on top of the reference data. Unfortunately while there is consensus that a CDI hub is critical for tying distributed customer data into unified views, there is rampant confusion among these styles in the marketplace.
Before an organization commits to a particular style we always suggest that they consider the fundamental business purpose of their current/future CDI hub and take into consideration things such as the frequency of business change, the scope or latency of unified views, their existing legacy IT environment, their operational versus analytical applications need, the types of data sources and data governance policies, etc. Beyond these characteristics, an organization should also choose a CDI style that is future-proof, meaning it can adapt to merger & acquisitions, re-organizations and other systemic organizational changes.
Siperian develops their CDI solution based on the Adaptive Transaction hub style. What is that exactly?
We obviously think this approach is the most suitable for today’s changing business and IT environments. The Adaptive Transaction hub style, like the one we offer, emerged most recently to address the limitations of the other CDI approaches. With the adaptive style, this type of hub is built as a platform for consolidating data from disparate third party and internal sources and for serving unified customer views to operational applications, analytical systems or both. Unlike other styles, this hub is data-model-neutral and uses templates, is tailored to meet the needs of each industry, and allows enterprise-specific data models to be implemented quickly. In effect this type of hub becomes the customer master or “system-of-record” for all systems.
What’s next for CDI?
Today, all the excitement is around selecting and implementing CDI hubs, but the real test in the future is going to be how these operational hubs get used once deployed i.e., which applications they feed, which analytics they drive, etc. That in turn will depend upon how easy it is to manage these live CDI hubs, day in day out, and how much effort is needed to extend these to new sources and applications. Companies that get enamored by a single CDI style will have run into trouble over time.
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David Sims is contributing editor for TMCnet. For more articles by David Sims, please visit:
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