Bateleur Software Solutions has been appointed sole agents for SearchSoftware America`s (SSA) name search and matching software products in South Africa, and is poised to embark on an aggressive campaign to expand the products customer base.
Bateleur assumed responsibility for SSA`s customer base from SPL, a division of Dimension Data Solutions, at the beginning of March this year.
SSA`s suite of products includes SSA-Name3 and the Data Clustering Engine (DCE), while two new products, Identity Systems (IDS) and Text Name Identification (TNI), have just recently been introduced to the South African market.
According to Sam Selmer-Olsen of Bateleur Software, SSA specialises in software that adds intelligence and quality to crucial name search and matching applications. The SSA software is used in Customer and CRM Systems as well as in systems for Marketing, Fraud, Data Warehousing and Web-enabled IM Systems. The software runs on mainframes, servers and workstations.
SSA has more than 16 years` experience and more than 350 customers in over 40 countries. Global customers include Fedex, AT&T, Lotus, IBM, Compaq, Readers Digest, VISA, Experian, JC Penny, Bank of New York, Andersen Consulting, New York Blood, The Hartford, The European Patent Office, Queensland Medical Labs, The Office of the Narcotics Control Board(Thailand) and an array of Australian and US state and governing bodies.
In South Africa, ABSA, SABC, South African Revenue Services, ITC, Sanlam and the Department of Central Statistics benefit from the products.
"As South African company databases grow, they`re becoming increasingly difficult to control, maintain and operate effectively. A system that finds, matches, groups and investigates identifications data about people, companies, places or things, is thus crucial to the maintenance of accurate information and the cost-effective utilisation of enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions and customer relationship management (CRM) principles," says Selmer-Olsen.
Explaining the product benefits, he notes that SSA-Name3 is a customisable set of software tools for developers of online and batch applications for dynamic search and match strategies using names, addresses and other identification entities.
The DCE is a batch application that groups, clusters and links identity data using SSA-Name3 algorithms . It is used for deduplication, file-to-file matching, householding, and fraud and data investigation.
IDS, in turn is an `out-of-the-box` software package that adds high quality identity search and matching applications to a user`s existing relational database tables. IDS provides ready-to-use on-line and batch processing of identification data, using SSA-Name3 algorithms without the need to write programs or change existing databases.
Text Name Identification allows high quality indexing, searching and matching to be performed on identification data embedded in free text.
"What makes the SSA product suite the most intelligent and accurate name matching software around is its ability to allow the application to mimic the expert business user. This is done to emulate an expert business user`s ability to find all possible candidates that could be identical to each other, or the same as the `search data`.
"What`s more, important data is more often than not missed as a result of weak indexing and large data volumes. The SSA suite of products overcomes this by compensating for discrepancies in spelling, phonetics and word sequence, as well as problems with foreign names, abbreviations, and missing names", concludes Selmer-Olsen.