Besides Trillium and Vality, specialist software providers include First Logic, Group 1 Software and Innovative Systems. Acxiom Corp. One of the biggest opportunities for using this technology, analysts say, is the booming e-commerce market. That's partly because new data warehouses and CRM applications are being built behind e-commerce sites to analyze and predict customer behavior, and they rely on cleaning up data entered by the customer and, in some cases, identifying a customer's activity among the thousands of users of the site. Sagent Technology Inc. last month rolled out a service called Centrus, joining companies such as Acxiom and HotData Inc. that provide software linking users' Web sites and other apps in real time to data-cleansing software and databases. Along with some of these new services is a pricing model that promises to make data-cleansing technology available to a much broader range of users.
Users also get a set of software routines that they can build into their Web applications.
But HotData's main offering to date has been another low-priced service aimed at sales professionals. The information is sent to HotData's site and returned, corrected, to the same fields on the salespeople's screens. Peter Avery, national vendor administrator at The Paint Bull, which provides products and training for auto improvements such as painting and dent repair, turned to HotData to solve an expensive problem. Paint Bull would purchase a database of prospective customers, such as auto-body repair shops, then mail them a package including a video and a catalog. Paint Bull relies on the direct-mail campaigns to generate about a third of its business, Avery says.