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By Hannah Smalltree, 13 Jun 2007 | SearchDataManagement.com

Many organizations know they want customer data mining software as part of their enterprise analytics strategy this year -- but they're uncertain about how to evaluate and deploy tools, according to a Gartner analyst.

There's a good reason for that, according to Gareth Herschel, research director with Stamford, Conn.-based Gartner Inc. and author of its recent Magic Quadrant for customer data mining. Buyers are hearing mixed messages from vendors and colleagues about the best way to approach customer data mining software evaluations, he said. These tools support sales, marketing and service departments with descriptive and predictive analytic capabilities such as clustering, segmentation, estimation, prediction and affinity analysis, according to the report and ranking of top software vendors. But customer data mining software evaluations can be challenging, Herschel explained. It's often not an apples-to-apples comparison -- and other organizational requirements, such as who will use the tool and where analysis will be deployed, need to be factored into the equation.

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But at the moment, the study's challengers quadrant is empty. This is normally where Herschel would place vendors that have customer data mining capabilities complementary to their business applications and a strong customer base. However, CRM leaders such as Microsoft, Oracle, Siebel and SAP haven't had strong offerings, he said. But that could change this year. Once these "800-pound gorillas of CRM" -- particularly Microsoft and Oracle -- come out with more market-impacting, visionary strategies, they could easily take over the challenger's quadrant as soon as next year, Herschel said.

There's a crowd of five in the niche quadrant, though, which includes vendors targeting a specific market segment -- such as a particular function, geography or business problem. Of the niche players, Toronto-based Angoss Software Corp. and Glasgow, U.K.-based ThinkAnalytics Ltd. have broad platforms, which they continue to expand, he said. Others address much more specific problems. Unica Corp., based in Waltham, Mass., is focused on marketing campaign management; Minneapolis-based Fair Isaac Corp.'s strength is enterprise decision management; and Alpharetta, Ga.-based Infor Global Solutions (formerly known as Epiphany) is focused on real-time data mining.

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