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February 7, 2001 10:14am
Compaq Launches 'Zero Latency'
Initiative
By Charles Babcock Inter@ctive Week
Compaq Computer is trying to capitalize on its large
server lines with a "Zero Latency Enterprise" initiative.
By doing business with its Business Critical Server
Group and partners, its customers will be able to
capture customer data as it is gathered and have it
immediately available for dealing with the customer
relationship, Compaq representatives said.
"Zero latency" is a termed coined last year by
GartnerGroup as a way of summing up the trend for
companies to work with fresher and fresher information.
In a zero latency operation, the data is captured and fit
into a context as soon as it is created in any corporate
system. Thus, a customer complaint on a previous
order is immediately available as the customer starts to
enter a new order, giving a sales representative a
chance to intervene if the previous problem appears to
be affecting the current order, said Howard Elias, senior
vice president at Compaq's Business-Critical Server
Group.
Compaq is, in effect, attempting to take advantage of a
recent development in data warehousing, the
operational data store, where systems know
automatically what data from an order-taking or
accounts receivable system should be forwarded to the
data warehouse. In the past, data was collected nightly
or perhaps weekly from such systems and became
available for analysis within what was viewed a year or
two ago as a reasonable time frame. Now Compaq and
partners, such as Savant Technologies, the SAS
Institute, Acxiom and Mercator Software, are trying to
make zero latency less of a theoretical construct and
make data, particularly customer data, immediately
available for use by other systems, Elias said.
"The Internet model has moved us all to act and
respond to our customers in real time," he said.
Compaq's ZLE systems rest on its NonStop Himalaya
server line, a high availability system that pairs up
servers so that one may fail without interrupting of
processing. Both the server hardware and its NonStop
database system were acquired in Compaq's purchase
of Tandem Computers. In addition, Compaq is offering
low latency data warehousing systems based on its
64-bit AlphaServer and its Intel-based ProLiant servers.
Savant Technologies is provide data extraction,
transformation and loading software that captures data
from an operational system and loads it in a predefined
way into the data warehouse.
Mercator will supply data transformation software that
reduces the effort of getting data used by one system
to work with another system.
SAS is a supplier of data mining and business
intelligence software for analyzing data.
Acxiom has software that links disparate systems to
provide a single real-time customer view.
Other partners include Blaze Software, a Brokat
company, which will provide a rules engine. Protagona
Worldwide will offer marketing and customer campaign
management systems. MicroStrategy will provide a
Web-based business intelligence platform, and The
Trillium Software Division of Harte-Hanks Data
Technologies will supply customer identification and
relationship matching software, Compaq spokesmen
said. |
