News
Unica Annouces Enterprise Edition
- By Scott Bekker
- October 29, 1998
Unica Technologies Inc. (Lincoln, Mass.,
www.unica-usa.com)today announced the release of version 4.1, the Enterprise Edition, of its Model 1 data mining software for database marketing. Model 1 is used by organizations in such as industries as banking, marketing, consulting, retailing, telecommunications, insurance, catalog and healthcare. The Enterprise Edition is designed to enhance Model 1's scalability and integration with customers' IT infrastructure.
Model 1 is comprised of 4 application-specific modules: Response Modeler, Customer Segmenter/Profiler, Customer Valuator and Cross-Seller that combine to form a data mining suite.
Model 1 helps businesses target marketing programs to lower the cost of acquiring new customers, cross-sell more products and services to existing customers, and predict customers likely to leave in time to take action to prevent it.
MODEL 1 automates the data mining process to allow the user to build thousands of models and will select which models perform the best based upon criteria that the user defines. MODEL 1 also provides methods for the more statistically oriented user to go "under the hood" to fine-tune and adjust individual model parameters. Driving this GUI is Unica Data Mining Engine (UDME). The Enterprise Edition has several more features:
- Client-server architecture: This provides for installation in a shared environment and better integration with corporations' network infrastructure.
- Multi-Processing: Several intensive modeling sessions can be offloaded to one or more servers while the end user can simultaneously analyze the results on his or her desktop. Results from each model are available as soon as it is built, even while the server is continuing to build more models.
- Direct database connectivity: Direct access to leading databases such as Oracle, Sybase, Informix, Microsoft SQL Server, and DB2 speeds the data access and database scoring processes and allows real-time interaction with corporate data.
- Symmetric Multi-Processing (SMP) capability: MODEL 1 performance scales linearly with the number of processors the server has, taking full advantage of the hardware to model large amounts of data in a short time.
- Larger data set handling: The Enterprise Edition can work with up to 2 Billion customer records (compared to 16 million records for the stand-alone version) with up to 16,350 variables for each record. That translates to terabytes of data.
- Multiple scoring options: There are several options for how to implement the results of a model. The customer can score directly within Model 1, can export a run-time model to a different machine, can score directly to a relational database, or can export C source code. This C code can then be compiled and run anywhere in the customer's organization.
The Enterprise Edition server portion is initially available on Windows NT platforms, AIX platforms, and Sun Microsystems and Fujitsu platforms running Sun Solaris. Other UNIX variants will be supported in upcoming releases. The client runs on Windows NT and Windows 95. --Brian Ploskina, Assistant Editor
About the Author
Scott Bekker is editor in chief of Redmond Channel Partner magazine.