Q1. Please provide specifics about what data points and analyses answers on customer behavior I will get from your product.
A1. The main intent of the application is to deliver analysis and understanding of the retail effectiveness of the site. It does this by providing analyses in three major areas, web site analysis, shopper analysis and merchandising analysis.
Web Site Analysis is focused on helping a site understand basic browsing behavior, visit analysis, referral analysis, etc.
Shopper analysis is focused on the customer, and looking at a customer over time to understand what affects their purchase behavior, conversion behavior, abandonment behavior etc. There are also analyses to help a site understand how their promotions affect a site's ability to convert customers and keep them buying. There are also detailed Recency, Frequency, and Duration metrics.
Merchandising analysis is focused on delivering analysis around the product. It provides an understanding how well a product sells, in what quantities, etc.
Q2. Who are your competitors, and what is the competitive edge that you hold over them? For instance, do you provide similar depth of customer analysis
and market segmentation as Personify?
A2. Hyperion has numerous partners that also double as competitors, but the eCRM Division which is focused on delivering analytics across marketing, sales and
service systems characterize our competitors into two major categories. Broad competitors like Epiphany and Broadbase that have both an online and offline focus for delivering analytics and more niche competitors like Accrue and net.Genesis who are solely focused on online channel.
One of our biggest strengths is that Hyperion has been a leader in business analysis for over ten years with experience with almost 7,000 customers. As our strength is in analytics, we focus on complementing operational systems and providing best of breed analytics. On a more product focused basis, all of our products leverage Hyperion Essbase which is the leading multi-dimensional OLAP software on the market(IBM OEMs this and rebrands it as DB2 OLAP Server). This enables our applications to truly optimize the business management cycle with our product's abilities to deliver reporting, analysis, modeling and planning. We also have significant partnerships with best of breed vendors across the industry from leading front-end vendors to leading CRM vendors such as IBM and Siebel.
Q3. How does your product affect our productions sites? i.e., What additional processing does your app. impose, and what, if any, additional log files data do you require?
A3. The main data source for the application is web server log files. This processing can be done away from the production sites and impose no extra load.
Additionally, the application requires extracts from the operational database to complete the analyses. This includes data from the store tables and shopping
tables in order to provide most of the shopping and merchandising analyses. This would usually be done in a batch format on a nightly basis.
The product is flexible enough to support the addition of other data that would supplement the analysis.
Q4. If we were to be interested, what is the pricing structure/model you work off of?
A4. Hyperion eCommerce Analysis Suite is priced based on a power unit and user based structure. It is composed of Hyperion Sessionizer which is priced based on the number of web servers it is providing analysis for, and the end-user application is based on a base price plus additional costs for users. As part of this
proposal there would be potential for significant license discounts in exchange for referencability.
Q5. What platforms (O/S and eCommerce frameworks) do you support?
A5. The entire eCommerce Application is designed to run on AIX, Solaris, or NT/2000. The end-user interface is completely thin-client and can run on most major web browsers. Additionally pieces of the application can run on additional platforms such as S/390, AS/400 and HP-UX.
We currently have been working directly with IBM to build close integration between WebSphere Commerce Suite and our application, but have also been creating or have planned integrations between ATG, Broadvision, Intershop and BEA. We have designed the application from the ground up to be flexible enough to support additional frameworks or homegrown systems.
