Intelligent Enterprise

In a busy week for master data management, Kalido announced plans to release an upgrade of Information Engine by the end of the month and D&B launched its first online data management application.

Kalido said the next version of its MDM software would include new collaboration capabilities. The new feature enables business users to identify issues and have request changes automatically routed to data stewards via Kalido's configurable, embedded workflow engine, which also builds an audit trail.

Information Engine in general lets users model business scenarios such as organizational change or margin analysis from a data warehouse and automatically feed the information to end users through business intelligence tools.

Other new features in the upgrade include the ability to separate work-in-progress master data from published master data. The software also provides precise control over how and when publication occurs. Together, the new capabilities give data owners more freedom in refining master data and more flexibility in constructing data governance processes based on business requirements, the vendor said.

Kalido says its Information Engine is designed to support more than 500 million master data records. With the latest version, the company claims to have significantly increased data load and validation speed.

The upgrade of Information Engine comes a month after Kalido introduced the KONA Information Appliance. Set to be released early next year, the package bundles Kalido's Information Engine and QlikTech reporting and dashboarding tools on Netezza's TwinFin Appliance. Kalido plans to sell and support KONA (Kalido On Netezza Appliance) as a single, pre-integrated product focused on industry-specific business information models.

Joining Kalido last week in announcing new MDM software was D&B, which introduced Complete Customer, an online managed customer database for sales and marketing professionals. The software as a service is geared toward helping businesses stay up-to-date on mergers and acquisitions, changing financial risk scores and other market changes.

The problem D&B is looking to solve is the difficulty businesses have in obtaining accurate, up-to-date customer data. According to the vendor, only 12% of sales and marketing professional have access to a well-integrated, real-time view of customer interactions. In addition, less than 40% report solid visibility into prospects and the sales pipeline.

The marketing intelligence provided by Complete Customer maximizes cross-sell and up-sell opportunities, D&B said. In addition theSaaS de -duplicates and centrally manages prospect data, making it easier to assign leads to the best account, territory or sales representative. As a single source of customer data, Complete Customer also helps in crediting sales bookings to the right accounts and sales reps.

Other features include the ability to consolidate business customers into their legal entities to monitor and mitigate financial risk for every customer.

D&B's SaaS offering provides integration with on-premise MDM initiative and products through adaptable Web service interfaces, the vendor said. "Additionally, organizations can tactically use Complete Customer to jump-start enterpriseMDM projects by attacking the complex data issues offsite with experienced D&B resources to guide them."

Complete Customer is scheduled for availability in November through D&B's Purisma Solutions group.