Data mining helps them target those customers. Jon Ferrara, GoldMine's vice president and co-founder, estimates that less than 20 percent of his users link the software to their Web sites. Some Bottlenecks Despite all the potential advantages, there are lots of data mining holdouts. As far as I can see, there are no standard definitions. The concern is that an executive doesn't know what he's going to get when he gets his company into data mining.
Thrasher is particularly wary of vendors that sell data mining as a panacea.
For that reason he's resisted the temptation to buy expensive data mining software-so far. There are enough positive stories about people making relatively large investments, but also receiving large returns, to keep me interested. Synopsis is fairly typical of most buyers. Don MacTavish, a senior research analyst at the Meta Group consultancy, says for now only larger companies are implementing data mining. Ovum Inc. Dave Tomcheck, assistant vice chancellor of administrative computing services at the University of California's Irvine campus, spent the past four years building a data warehouse that contains financial information, equipment records and basic employee data.