A Software Insider's Point of View

Complete Customer Addresses Today’s Market Conditions

On October 5th, D&B Purisma Solutions group announced its first hosted business data management app.  When generally available in November 2009, Complete Customer will deliver a customer database that will be self managed by organizations departments.  Organizations and their departments will take ownership of their data in a hosted offering.  The solution provides much needed relief because customers must:

• Reduce the time to market of deployments. Customers can no longer afford years let alone months for deployment.  They seek impactful solutions with little deployment risk.
• Leverage existing investments. Customers own a patch work of CRM, trusted information, BI, legacy ERP, and other solutions.  If they can consolidate their solutions, they save money on integration costs and potentially reduce long term ownership costs.
• Acquire solutions at lower price points. Solutions must past through more rigor in the budget approval process.  Line of business executives seek swipe and buy solutions, OpEx over CapEx, and minimal commitments in contracts.

Complete Customer Provides Hosted Offering

D&B’s Complete Customer solution delivers three key features (see Figure 1):

• Data management - D&B data enrichment, double-byte fuzz match, master record construction, and custom hierarchies.
• Data maintenance - data stewardship, source system, syncing, data purification at entry, customer life cycle management.
• Hosting services subscription pricing model - online secure access, hosted, D&B data and subscription pricing.

Figure 1.  Complete Customer Data Steward Screen Shots

(Source: D&B )

The Bottom Line - MDM And CDI Solutions Will Move To The Cloud

D&B’s hosted offering will help existing D&B users leverage their current investments without making significant upfront investments in traditional on-premise customer data integration (CDI) and master data management (MDM) solution offerings.  While this solution only addresses a small footprint of a traditional CDI or MDM solution and focuses on B2B, these first steps towards a toolkit will provide immediate benefits such as:

• Improving lead management
• Targeting cross sell and up sell opportunities
• Monitoring credit exposure
• Maintaining accurate sales account credit

Customers must move to hybrid models as today’s innovative solutions live beyond the on-premise world.  Today the focus will be on faster results and leveraging reference data.  Tomorrow, the issues will focus on managing the proliferation of channels and entities.  Concepts such as B2B or B2C will no longer matter as we move to P2P. Organizations will need to resolve identity in order to deliver the critical insight required for social businesses.

Your POV.

Are you looking for bite sized MDM/CDI?  Are you currently a D&B customer?  Did you know you can augment your D&B data?  Feel free to post your comments here or send me an email at rwang0 at gmail dot com if you need assistance with your MDM project or other topic areas.