Make the information clever and intelligible : here is the new challenge decided by the Data Base Forum during its first meeting of the year on the subject of e-commerce tools.
Is the data base over? It isn't sure. However, they changed. This is what emerges from the Data Base Forum's first meeting of the year on e-commerce tools which took place at the Ceram of Sophia Antipolis. At the opening, thus, Professor Serge Miranda, insisted on the key role of decision-making technologies laying on those 'information basis'. From now on, it is the identification, authentification and localization of the user which will allow to personalize services offered on the Web as various as the wireless telephone, the pocket diary, the interactive television or the PC.
Targeting on location-based services
The aim is to 'develop the capital represented by the data of the customer and a strategy of dependant services for the localization of the user. Car rental companies, hotel chains and actors of the large-scale distribution will know how to exploit the assets of those golden mines that became the CRM (Customer Relation Management)…The operator will loose the exclusivity of the customer's information property quite soon', Serge Miranda plans. This change explains the reasons of the substitution of data base by information base.
According to Olivier Bouzereau, journalist specialized in computers, a tendency is to keep in mind. The 'telecommunication operators, computer manufacturers, editors, public and private companies acknowledge the necessity to develop customer relation applications. Those applications will be more clever and will deliver relevant on-line services for the user.
The MBDS, prototype of clever services
The financial and media sectors, in particular with the Swedish Bank, S.E.B, and Reuters group, are asking the MBDS to develop such prototypes. A meeting is planned in the principality at the end of October, launching date of new services…which are wireless!'
Students of the MBDS will work on the development of several interactive and multimedia services in 2001, multi-networks and personalized services which could motivate or ease the decisions of users. In this context, it was reminded that the stakes of management technologies of mobile data have already spread worldwide. In the Caribbean and at the University of Haiti in particular, similar projects are established in partnership with the MBDS but also with the Universities of Montreal, Louvain and Miami.
An easier access to knowledge
In the morning, two testimonies of users were followed by a round table gathering the main editors of the market : IBM, Informatica Partners, Oracle. The first one was about the experience of France Telecom Longue Distance, set up by François de Longeaux, in charge of Informatica Partners' consulting pole. It was followed by the traditional infocentres for an architecture of unified datas, offering an easier access to knowledge, reviews and traffic measures of the operator.
The project for the development of loyalty, called OASIS, then, the pharmaceutical Laboratory, Théramex, and the establishment of an entire tool of analysis and recommendation for the operational strategy to come : the micro-marketing. Two missions were given to OASIS : discover and gain potential clients (a general practitioner out of two prescribe in gynaecology without mentioning it on its sign; they are around 30 000 practitioners to do so); and develop the loyalty of the customer, that is to say remaining its favourite medical visitor.
Main decision-maker
Concerning the editors, according to Frantz de Rycke, EMEA West Region Data Management Market Manager IBM, the aim is to give every user the access to useful information wherever he is, while surfing on several websites at the same time. According to Pascal Rawsin, in charge of Oracle Internet Data Base Marketing, Oracle 9i is the Business Intelligence which follows the Web' : A decision-making offer specially made for Internet and called BI Inside (main decision-maker).
Finally, Hervé Kauffmann, Manager of Informatica Partners Operations, presented eSITE, a serie of applications able to 'make the information clever' and analyse the behaviours of Internet users. Three editors, which have already entered, at the end, the new age of data base.