Right now there's no standard way to cluster customer information that is spread across databases. If a database supports OLE DB for Data Mining, you only need to specify once how to pull everything together. After that, the data mining specification does it for you. The algorithms also solve problems with high dimensional, sparse data. High dimensional data contains millions of data points in thousands of dimensions.
Sparse data means that each entity has only a few of the characteristics that are being measured.
Clustering documents is one application of this algorithm. They're very interested in analyzing sequences that occur in data. They'd like to answer questions about how and in what order people browse a web site. They're investigating algorithms which take into account the time that these events occur. This information will be useful to the thousands of dot coms hoping to get your business by serving up the content that you want when you need it, instead of making you slog through pages and pages of ever increasing data.