Looking For A Clearer View Of The CustomerLooking For A Clearer View Of The Customer

Customers can be a demanding lot. And businesses are finding that without a consolidated view of their customer data, meeting those ever-higher customer expectations is tough.

"I have a customer-relationship-management system that has a customer master [file]. I have an order-management system that has a customer master. If the information between those systems doesn't agree, which one is true?" asks Steve Canter, CIO of Berlin Packaging LLC, a $200 million-a-year maker of rigid packaging for consumer goods. "The biggest problem I have is determining what my source of truth is."

Customer-data-integration technology was in the spotlight last week when IBM said it would acquire DWL Inc., a privately held developer of the software, for an undisclosed price. The deal will close later this year.

Customer data in many IT companies remains balkanized as CRM, enterprise-resource-planning, and supply-chain-management systems have proliferated. That means the IT behind customer-facing operations such as call centers often can't provide employees with a single view of a customer.

Asked how close he is to achieving a 360-degree view of his customers, Atique Shah, VP of CRM at racetrack syndicate Churchill Downs Inc., laughs and says, "I believe we're probably at about 190 degrees." Churchill Downs has 27 sources of customer information, and refereeing among them is a constant problem, Shah says.

In concept, customer-data integration provides a universal view of a customer by resolving discrepancies in names and addresses and summarizing customer-interaction data from multiple systems. A bank with customer information in checking-account, mortgage, and consumer-loan databases can use the technology to identify its best customers and increase cross-selling opportunities. Businesses want a better return on their CRM systems, says Aaron Zornes, chief research officer at The Customer Data Integration Institute.

DWL, a $30 million-a-year company, was the leading pure-play customer-data-integration business. But its prospects were limited by its size, chairman Justin LaFayette says. "We found ourselves challenged for resources in a number of vertical industries and geographies where we didn't have any people." IBM already was a partner, with 100 consultants trained in DWL's product line, which often runs with IBM's WebSphere middleware.

Technology alone won't fix problems with customer data, warns John Radcliffe, an analyst at Gartner. "It's more complex than most people think." Companies often underestimate the time and money needed to fix problems, he says.

IBM will compete with Siebel Systems Inc., which launched its Universal Customer Master system in 2003, and Oracle, which debuted its Customer Data Hub product last year. Earlier this year, SAP added master-data-management capabilities to its NetWeaver platform.

DWL joins a list of acquisitions IBM has made to build out its portfolio of data-management and -integration software. Those include Trigo Technologies and its product-information-management apps. In April, IBM bought Ascential Software Corp. and its data-movement and -transformation software for $1.1 billion.