Knowledge Integration Dynamics, the business intelligence company, has signed a business partnership agreement with Pulse, another business intelligence company and the local distributor of Alta Europe`s Netmap specialist data warehousing range of products. One of Alta`s preferred database engines for Netmap is Informix Red Brick, the specialist data warehouse database for which KID has signed a VAR relationship with Informix South Africa.
Pulse markets Alta`s specialist product, Netmap Retail Solution, which provides detailed analysis and detection of fraud in the retail industry. With KID having signed up many key retailers in the local market, including Foschini, Specialty Stores, Metcash and Masstores, the relationship was a logical one, says KID MD Aubrey van Aswegen.
"Netmap has proven its value many times in overseas markets in reducing the level of fraud in the retail industry, among others. The retail industry in South Africa suffers from a high incidence of fraud, making it an ideal market for the Informix Red Brick-Netmap combination."
Netmap has its origins in the intelligence industry. The Netmap Retail Solution is presented, along with Informix Red Brick acting as a repository, as a "black-box" data warehouse solution, which means in effect that the inner workings are concealed from the customer organisation. This is how many companies want data warehousing solutions delivered today, says Marc Dunlop of Alta.
"Business analysts want the solution, not the complexity," says Dunlop, "and they want answers to their queries fast enough to encourage `train-of-thought` analysis. Netmap permits this, complementing other analysis techniques and presenting the data visually to allow analysts to look at it from various angles."
Existing South African customers of Netmap include Eskom, Telkom, Multichoice, Alexander Forbes and FNB. However, Alta has had enjoyed much of its success in the UK retail market, where it is used typically to track fraud. Van Aswegen says KID will also be targeting this market in South Africa, where Informix Red Brick is already in use at a number of large retail organisations.
"The scale of retail fraud is extraordinary," says Dunlop. "The industry tends to recognise stock loss or shrinkage as representing 2-4% of turnover. Reducing this figure by half has a dramatic effect on the bottomline."
Other areas where Netmap`s deployment would be suitable in the area of loss prevention are refunds and discounts, price overrides and staff card misuse.
Netmap is also used for basket analysis, consumer buying habits and micro-marketing, and product affinity analysis: to ascertain which products are bought by customers at the same time so as to create more profitable groupings of products and boost store turnover. An emerging use of Netmap is as a business intelligence layer in e-commerce and Internet-enabled applications, such as clickstream analysis.
In terms of their partnership, KID and Pulse will target joint customers and resell each other`s offerings and services, with Pulse providing application knowledge and KID`s specialist data warehousing implementation capability. "The combination of Informix Red Brick and Netmap is very powerful indeed," says Pulse`s Paul van der Merwe. "For instance, at a UK customer site it consistently returns complex queries against two years` aggregated EPOS data in under a second."
Alta was founded in 1990 to acquire Netmap, which had been marketed originally to map organisational communications. Alta enhanced its data mining capabilities to benefit the broader market, and counts KPMG, Coopers & Lybrand and Software AG among its market alliances.
Among breakthrough applications for which Netmap has been used are analysis of telephone logs to track money laundering; securities filings and trades for evidence of insider trading; and insurance claims data to locate organised fraudulent claims activities.
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