E.piphany Competency Center
Metabyte has established an E.piphany Competency Center, which is staffed by CRM and analytics experts with extensive E.piphany experience. Metabyte offers expertise in combinations that range from complete projects down to just a day of advice. This hands-on knowledge is combined with experienced project management and planning and with Metabyte's track record of project success.

Core E.piphany Products:
  • Insight or Analytics: A data mart in a box including data model generation, ETL tool, semantics, aggregation engine, and web reporting engine. The reports are designed for the web and for progressive discovery where instead of one huge report there is a smaller report with drill capabilities to get the details. Data mining is included. Strength of the tool is ease of use -- users really do define their own reports - and integration of its layers such that changes to the data model result in automatic migration and synced updates to ETL, aggregation, and reporting. Weaknesses are that complex pre-formatted reports are hard to define.

  • Campaign: The modified star data model useful for mass analysis does not work for generation of individual lists. The campaign tool uses an automatic inversion of the star and a pretty cool GUI to allow easy specification of very complex criteria and for rapid execution. The ultimate result of the campaign tools is detailed lists, but how these lists turn into executed campaigns is generally left to the emailer or to non-E.piphany processes.

  • Email: Uses the lists generated by the campaign tool to populate and send email templates. Is a real email blaster using its own email engine to deal at lower levels of the protocols to avoid the slowness caused by serialization at the higher levels. Includes support for instant unsubscribe where user opt-outs take effect immediately.

  • Real time or Interaction Advisor: Really cool technology that delivers conclusions based on some pre-computed characteristics along with data just captured in the current user session. This non-batch behavior is what makes the tool good for real-time or interactions. Generally its conclusions are in the form of the best offer to present. Includes good marketing user offer definition interface and a learning engine that discovers which offers work best for different sub-communities.

  • Sales: Neat sales force automation tool with laptop sync. Focus is delivering value to the sales rep rather than imposing onerous interfaces designed to capture data desired by management.

  • Service: Basically a screen application builder with back end services. Built from the beginning to be based in J2EE and does not have to deal with some of the complications other products contain from legacy architectures.

The rest of the product line is largely variations of the above where combinations are bundled for some specific usage or vertical. Some of these come with pre-built data models but as with any product care must be taken to see to what degree their model matches your needs and what must be customized. Custom ETL is generally required even where there is a pre-built data model in order to connect to the various systems of record.

Metabyte's team includes ex-employees of E.piphany who performed key roles such as creating E.piphany's patented adaptive datamart approach, writing the ETL engine, developing episcript, building much of the meta data management layer and developing the translation technology.


Did You Know ...

IDC expects IT spending to reach $496.7 billion in the U.S. and $1.3 trillion on a worldwide level by 2009. While the communications and media, healthcare, financial, and consumer markets are expected to be the most sought-after industries in terms of growth opportunities, government and discrete manufacturing will continue to account for the largest percentage of overall IT spending within the U.S. through 2009. (Source: IDC)