Spinning profits out of web

By ADAM GIFFORD

Database vendor Informix's guiding principle for the internet economy is PTA - not Parent Teacher Association, but publish, transact and analyse.

Informix New Zealand manager James Rea explained that most people want to publish something on the web.

"When they publicise something, they want to do a transaction. The third thing they want to do is analysis. Customers want to run their business over the web and do it profitably, and this needs business intelligence."

Mr Rea said that over the past 18 months Informix has used the PTA framework to determine what components it should buy to add to its database engine.

These include DataStage, which allows organisations to bring together data from virtually any source including internet data from web servers and e-mail; Red Brick, a leading data warehousing technology; Cloudscape, a small-footprint, pure Java database which allows mobile staff to synchronise their data and applications; and Visionary, which allows users to build "digital dashboards" to see the specific data they need in graphical format.

In addition it set up two new divisions, one developing applications for the web and the other working on business intelligence.

The latter, or i.Infrastructure division, is headed by Anne Wynn, who was in New Zealand recently to run a seminar on "e-commerce meets business intelligence.

"One of our customers, e-greetings.com, which makes electronic greeting cards and makes its money selling advertising on the site, told us they were only processing five per cent of the data coming in. The company needs to know what works and what doesn't and how to keep people coming back to the site."

Informix built a solution on top of the Informix database which gives all staff a dashboard application telling them the most popular cards and allowing them to dig further for more information. It means the webmistress, or datamadam as she calls herself - this is a Silicon Valley start-up - does not drown in data.

"We used Data Stage to do the data abstraction and data movement, load it into Red Brick, which is the analytical engine, and visualise it with Visionary."

This combination, seen as doing the analytical part of the PTA, has been packaged into a product called i.Decide. The publishing bit is called i.Reach, which allows content owners or creators to easily publish and maintain content in the internet or intranets, sharply reducing the cost of maintaining web sites.

Transaction is done by i.Sell, Informix's electronic storefront product, which also does the personalisation, so the site recognises the user next time they visit.

Ms Wynn said it is being used by some of the on-line stockbroking firms to classify customers as high-risk or low-risk traders, so they can show them different ads.

Because every web site is different, Informix wanted to build applications which are "80 per cent there, out of the box," and require only 20 per cent in consulting services.

While visualisation tools and digital dashboards aren't new, what Visionary adds to i. Decide is the ability to incorporate complex data like video and voice to the analytical mix.

"It allows you to put up a query on a database, so it can change every time you refresh, and the human eye will pick out any anomaly in the masses of data on a page faster than you can read it and your brain can figure out the numbers. Once you see an anomaly you can click on it and drill down and detail the graph more."

Mr Rea said because of the scarcity of technical resources worldwide, Informix is only now releasing the i. Reach, i. Sell and i. Decide products in New Zealand.

It will have an entry level i. Sell product available within the next couple of months for $100,000. Currently implementations cost anything from $200,000 to $2 million. Purchasing and implementing the whole publish-transact-analyse cycle could cost anywhere from $500,000 to $4 million.

The average price of a Red Brick data warehouse implementation is about $30,000. Adding the Visionary technology, which means users can question the data and see visual representations of patterns, brings the price up to about $120,000.