Management of Privacy Policies Is Top Concern Among Global 2000 Companies Integrating Customer Data

DWL Customer 5.5 Introduces Best-in-Class Features to Help Major Corporations Cope With Privacy Issues

DWL announced today a new version of its industry-leading customer data integration (CDI) software. DWL Customer(TM) 5.5 offers dramatic improvements for organizations seeking to comply with privacy options. A report issued this month by the CDI Institute reinforced the importance of this functionality, with 92 percent of Global 2000 respondents citing the ability to centrally manage privacy policies as a primary business driver for adopting a best-of-breed CDI solution. DWL Customer 5.5 also introduces easy-to-use administrative data stewardship tools for comprehensive customer data governance.

DWL Customer(TM) gives companies an enterprise-wide, single view of all their customers (including hierarchical views of business or corporate customers) and related data, which then allows them to better market and sell new services, while improving the customer experience. Driven by mergers, intense market competition and the need to make data management processes more efficient across large organizations, the overall CDI services and software market grew 135 percent from 2003 to 2004, according to the CDI Institute.

"The impressive CDI growth rates are fueled by the fact that current customer data systems can no longer cope with the demands of integrating massive loads of disparate customer data while balancing specific consumer preferences and meeting privacy regulations," said Aaron Zornes of the CDI Institute. "Our survey validates this issue -- 95 percent of Global 2000 financial services and life sciences companies, for example, are actively looking to replace home-grown CDI solutions with a 'best-of-breed' CDI solution."

New privacy-related functionality in DWL Customer(TM) 5.5 includes the ability to more easily manage complex regulatory requirements for customer data. This allows for more straightforward management of customer privacy preferences, which enables organizations to better manage privacy data across business units to improve customer service.

In addition to its market-leading privacy functionality, DWL has introduced other important functions that lower the total cost of ownership of Customer Data Integration. DWL Customer(TM) 5.5 has improved integration with other applications, improved the automation of customization and extensions to reduce implementation times, and improved data quality management to reduce the cost of bad customer data.

Accurate Customer Data Management with the Data Stewardship Application

DWL Customer(TM) 5.5 introduces a data stewardship application interface that vastly improves internal administrators' ability to manage customer data quality. The Data Stewardship application produces lists of duplicate suspect customer records. The application automatically identifies the best suspect match for the party, as well as managing data survivorship rules that automatically select the best data for the surviving customer record. This application allows organizations to streamline centralized data quality management around the customer master hub. Improved customer data quality results in dramatic cost reduction in terms of errors resulting from incorrect customer data.

Integration with Best-of-Breed Third Party Customer Data Marketing Services

DWL Customer(TM) 5.5 introduces integration with Acxiom to retrieve and store AbiliTec® links and enhanced matching rules to ensure customer data accuracy across operational systems. DWL Customer(TM) 5.5 is the first CDI customer master hub solution to offer this level of integration with a best-of-breed customer recognition service vendor. "Customer data integration (CDI) is an increasingly important subset of Customer Information Management. It forms a key part of customer information strategies to solve issues around siloed customer data, data quality and ongoing data integration. Organizations should choose best-in-class solutions that function as an operational system of record and can support a "closed loop" where customer information and insight flows in a timely manner between operational and third party marketing systems," said John Radcliffe, VP Research, Gartner.

Enhanced customization and configuration tools

DWL Customer(TM) 5.5 introduces new tools that reduce the time and effort involved in customization and extensions. The composite transaction framework and extension wizard enable organizations to create new transactions from existing ones or to extend the core product more easily and quickly. These tools enable organizations to shorten implementation time and therefore time to value, which reduces the total cost of ownership of their CDI investment.

Enhanced integration with EAI and Business Process Management tools

DWL Customer(TM) 5.5 introduces integration with IBM's WebSphere Business Integrator (WBI) application. This release has pre-integrated selected DWL Customer(TM) business services with the WBI application. This enables clients to more easily and cost-effectively integrate DWL Customer(TM) 5.5 with other applications in a service-oriented architecture.

About DWL Customer(TM)

DWL Customer(TM) is the most robust customer master data hub on the market today. It maintains the single version of customer truth, going beyond simple cleansing and matching functions to be the single source of operational customer data management across the enterprise. It provides unique 'business services' to maintain the integrity of your customer data and can create new business opportunities through its complex customer event notification functions.

In benchmarking tests, DWL Customer(TM) produced average response times in the 120 milli-second range with over 100 million customer records in the database and transaction volumes of close to 600,000 transactions per hour. Unlike front and back office application customer information files (CIFs) that cannot meet demanding performance requirements, DWL Customer(TM) was designed to perform in the most demanding performance environments, making it the leading CDI solution for large organizations.

Pricing and Availability

DWL Customer(TM) 5.5 is currently available. Pricing varies according to the number of customers and product configuration.

About DWL

DWL www.dwl.com)"> is the authoritative customer data integration (CDI) solution. DWL works with organizations worldwide to address enterprise-wide customer data integration (CDI) strategies using DWL Customer(TM), the most robust customer master data hub on the market. Based on a service-oriented architecture, DWL Customer(TM) provides organizations with the single source of their customer data across multiple product and business silos. It delivers this single, real-time view plus a set of unique business services to maintain and manage complex customer "events" to all channels and provides the foundation for a truly complete multi-channel integration and CRM strategy.

Founded in 1996, DWL is headquartered in Atlanta and has offices in New York, Boston, Chicago, Toronto, St. Louis, London, São Paulo and Kuala Lumpur. DWL clients include SunTrust, MetLife, Citi Cards, Atlantic Blue Cross Care, Empire Financial, Nationwide Insurance and UnumProvident.

DWL has strategic relationships with IBM, Acxiom, and other leading data quality and ETL (extract, transform and load) vendors. Technology partners include IBM, BEA Systems, Oracle and Sun Microsystems. Key systems integrator relationships include IBM Business Consulting Services, Deloitte Consulting, Bearing Point and Accenture. DWL has been recognized by Deloitte as one of the fastest growing technology companies in North America for three consecutive years and by leading analyst groups including META, Forrester and Gartner as a leader in the customer data integration solution space.

DWL is a registered trademark of DWL Inc.

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