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Forrester: Helping Business Thrive on Technology Change

Customer hubs represent the intersection of technology solutions and a category of packaged application software that operationalizes the acquisition, distribution and management of customer information for use in other systems.1 Customer data integration/customer hubs are a key technology component of delivering on continuous customer management.

Packaged customer hub vendors deliver solutions that combine data cleansing, data matching and data management with integrated stewardship and administration. True customer hub vendors seek delicate balances between infrastructure players and customer-focused solutions on the technology axis.

Figure 1: Customer hub vendors require a delicate balance between technology and usage.

Infrastructure players focus on the technical aspects of data integration. Characteristics include focus on data models, data acquisition, data cleansing, integration and synchronization, event management, metadata management and architecture.

Customer-focused solutions tend to enable improved use of customer information for consuming systems such as business intelligence, action frameworks, sales operations, marketing automation and decision support systems. Prioritized areas include data deduplication, hierarchy management, data stewardship and event management.

Intelligent consumption vendors focus on how data will be used. Traditional vendors include trusted data source providers as well as business intelligence vendors. Some solutions represent the action frameworks market.

Transactional maintenance solutions are characterized by an emphasis on data infrastructure, quality and transactional processing. Common solutions represented include information management, data quality, data modeling and traditional enterprise applications vendors in the customer relationship management and enterpriser resource planning areas.

All material excerpted from "The Forrester Wave: Customer Hubs, Q4 2006" by R. "Ray" Wang with Eric G. Brown, Rob Karel, Ian Schuler and Emily Van Metre, Forrester Research, 22 December 2006. For more information, go to www.forrester.com.

Reference:

  1. Best Practices, "CDI: A Path To Continuous Customer Management." Forrester Research, April 20, 2005.

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