The iSeries Drives New ASP-based Business Intelligence Offerings

by Alex Woodie

Analytical and Information Services is an Orlando, Florida, company that helps destination resorts and five- star hotels crunch data about their guests so they can keep them coming back. The 360 Group is a San Rafael, California, organization that helps companies in many industries create marketing plans and manage their customer relationships more effectively. Both companies are working to build new analytical offerings that leverage their working knowledge of the iSeries to deliver valuable information to their clients using the Internet.

The 360 Group: Data On Call

The 360 Group started in 1968 as Sales Promotion Services. Back then, the company provided local clients with access to its database of Marin County homeowners, which the clients explored using what was at the time state-of-the-art technology: keypunch cards and rented time on a local mainframe.

As the marketing world expanded and technology evolved, the company changed its name to 360 Group to reflect the full circle of services it offered. Today the company provides strategic consulting, targeted media planning, creative development, print production, response management, and analytic services to a range of clients, including Universal Studios, Cricket Communications, and the University of Phoenix.

Despite its new offerings, custom development of marketing databases has remained one of the most important services 360 Group offers. "We'll take a customer's data, mine it, and then make a recommendation about who their potential customers are," says Don Klabunde, 360 Group's chief technology officer.

However, because of the work involved in obtaining the data, cleansing it, populating the database, and doing the analysis, it has been a relatively costly service, and a slow one to implement for customers. The 360 Group needed to create a standardized model for creating multidimensional databases that its customers could use themselves.

So 360 Group turned to IBM and its multidimensional database application, DB2 OLAP Server. Installed on an iSeries Model 820 since August 2001, DB2 OLAP Server has helped to shorten the time it takes to load data and develop easy-to-use marketing databases, says Klabunde.

"We walk in the door now and have an 80 percent solution," says Klabunde. "Marketing information just doesn't vary that much from industry to industry--names, addresses, e-mail addresses, phone numbers, and response data. Bringing in DB2 OLAP Server has allowed us to take that data and load it more easily."

After building the multidimensional database, called a "cube," the company lets its clients do their own analysis over the Internet using IBM's Data Analyzer, which features a Java applet that runs within a standard Web browser. Clients can examine the effectiveness of sales campaigns or drill-down into specific data sets, all from the comfort of their offices.

One of the best aspects of the iSeries business intelligence solution is that users don't need to be techies to use the tool. "The problem that most users have with databases is that, unless they're DBAs [database administrators], they don't understand the relationships [between] the data." But t"hey don't have to understand the structure of the data cube" to be productive with Data Analyzer, says Klabunde.

The 360 Group plans to use DB2 OLAP Server to land new customers. "We have a couple of clients using it now, and they're very happy with it," says Klabunde. "From a new business development standpoint, it's huge."

One of the factors helping 360 Group is that most companies do not have the expertise, the time, or the patience to create sophisticated databases. "They're so busy dealing with day to day issues, it's tough to justify," says Klabunde. "Most of them do it from an IT perspective, not from a marketing perspective. The IT guys come in with their plan for a multidimensional database, and the guys in marketing just roll their eyes, laugh, and giggle.. We can do it for a fraction of what it would cost the company to do it themselves."

An AS/400 guy from way back, Klabunde has spent much of his career working on Unix platforms, including Sun Microsystem's servers and Oracle's database solutions. He said he was pleasantly surprised with the progress the platform had made in his absence. "When I came in here and learned they ran the iSeries, I did quite a bit of research," he says. "I'm really very happy, especially with the model we're running. I couldn't imagine delivering that capability in a Unix platform."

Klabunde said his support costs would double or triple what they are now if they had taken the Oracle route. "I'm just thrilled we don't have three Oracle DBAs," he said. "And the box itself, I can scale up. Coming from having to scale sideways, like you do in a Unix Oracle environment, I can't tell you how huge it is."

A Five-Star Data Affability Project

For the last 19 years, Analytical and Information Services has made its living slicing and dicing critical data for four- and five-star hotels and resorts across the country. Like 360 Group, AIS provides full-service data manipulation for its customers, including The Greenbrier in West Virginia, the Cloister on Sea Island, Georgia, and the Amelia Island Plantation in northern Florida.

The result of extracting the data from a property management system, cleansing the data, loading it into a data warehouse, and then analyzing it for trends is that AIS's clients get a clearer picture of which guests return to their hotel, why, and how to keep them coming back for more.

In the past, AIS delivered its results to customers by mailing them a 200-page report filled with dense charts and graphs. Then AIS started shipping CDs with the relevant information to its customers.

Now AIS is in the beginning stages of building a new ASP delivery model that will give clients access to the data analysis over the Internet. However, the new ASP model isn't only about eliminating the CDs, says Pete Smith, president of AIS. "The CD is a very easy way to deliver information,". but "the Internet actually adds complexity.... When you're dealing with 55-year-old CEOs, they are often very comfortable with getting the simplest method of access to information fully prepared." The driving force behind the new AIS delivery model is giving its clients access to as much information as possible, in the easiest manner allowable. "It will be a big move, but I don't see it as that difficult of a transition," says Smith. "I think our customers are ready for it."

Smith says the software tools are ready, too. The company plans to purchase a multidimensional database system from either Cognos, ShowCase, or IBM. Whatever solution the company chooses, however, it will run on the company's OS/400 server, as will WebSphere Application Server, which will deliver client-side query tools written in Java that will launch in customers' browsers. Custom coding will be done in VisualAge for RPG.

One of the market factors influencing Smith's decision to move forward with this project is that occupancy rates in American hotels have dropped because of the September 11 terrorist attacks and the recession. Smith says these factors are encouraging hotels to regain market share by beefing up their marketing and sales campaigns, as opposed to developing new properties.

The dropping occupancy rates are also encouraging hotels to rethink their IT strategies, he says. "IT staff is strategic but 'not immediately essential to providing the service level that guests expect," says Smith. "They're easy candidates for layoffs. The opportunity to outsource the management and manipulation of sales data for marketing campaigns, from an IT perspective, is clearly a lower cost."

Smith says the ASP delivery of information will be online by the third or fourth quarter of 2002 and will cost hotels about the same amount of money as the salary of one IT staffer.