telecaster follow-up...
i wonder what kind of $$ participation is in place with MSTR...
Broadcast engine delivers personal touch
By Mark Hammond, PC Week Online
September 13, 1999 9:00 AM ET
Companies trying to better communicate with their customers have a new tool that marries data warehousing and computer teleph ony technologies.
MicroStrategy Inc. will begin shipping this week Telecaster, a broadcasting engine endowed with telephony and text-to-voice capabilities to reach customers, employees and business partners via telephone.
Telecaster enables a company to deliver personalized messages to its audience by working against data in DSS Server, MicroStrategy's analytic engine, said officials inVienna, Va. For instance, a brokerage could use Telecaster to notify an investor that a particular stock price had fallen below a predefined threshold.
Telecaster is based in part on DSS Broadcaster, a similar product from MicroStrategy that delivers personalized messages via e-mail, pagers, cell phones, fax machines and personal digital assistants. Telecasterincorporates telephony technology from Call Technologies Inc. and text-to-voice software from Fonix Corp.
Telecaster users set either predefined schedules or individually defined exception criteria to initiate a phone call, with data delivered to its engine from a DSS Server data warehouse.
The software's XML Engine component uses Extensible Markup Language to manage data input and output.
The first release of Telecaster converses only in English. Beta testing is under way for Spanish, German, French and Portuguese language versions, although officials did not say when they would be available.
Systems may be configured to offer users a means of acting on information by responding on the telephone keypad.
“It adds value by providing very personal ized information,” said Michael Zirngibl, a product manager at MicroStrategy. “We see the potential for Telecaster to provide one-to-one dialogues to build relation ships in the supply chain and more compellingly with the directconsumer.”
MicroStrategy officials acknowledged that overzealous users could use Telecaster to launch a barrage of automated telemarketing messages that inundate customers. But they said they don't believe that will be common because companies want to cultivate loyalty among customers.
MicroStrategy is offering Telecaster both as a product and as an outsourced service. Telecaster pricing begins at $35,000 and requires DSS Server and Windows NT.
MicroStrategy is at (703) 848-8600 or www.microstrategy.com. |
