More companies are trying to drive value from Big Data whether improving the accuracy and reliability of business intelligence, preventing fraud, understanding customer sentiment, or curing diseases. With the explosion of Big Data comes more bad data. With Melissa Data, organizations can achieve better outcomes by verifying global customer data in real-time and ensuring the quality of additional types of data.
“Analytics is the leading use case for Big Data. Companies are processing huge datasets quickly and economically, but Big Data simultaneously introduces data quality challenges” said Bud Walker, VP of Sales and Strategy at Melissa Data. “Bad data leads to flawed analytics and insights, so the outcomes are compromised and the business value suffers. Data blending from enriched and multisourced datasets can augment analytics and reporting.”
Melissa Data’s rich set of Cloud and on-premise APIs and broad support of platforms ensures that its customers can benefit in more ways from clean data, including creating “Big Data blends” that tie Big Data analytics to reference data, such as the social media pulse of a particular product release. Using Melissa Data services and APIs, enterprises can improve business intelligence using validated data that is optimized for Big Data analytics and a 360-degree view of the customer.
Melissa Data was named to the SD Times 100 list for its excellence in the Database and Data Management category. Over the last year, the company has continued to expand the breadth and depth of its award-winning data-management capabilities, and has augmented its international presence with a new office in Australia to complement existing regional offices in the United Kingdom, Germany and India. The company is now also Service Organization Controls 2 (SOC2) certified.
“SOC2 certification is a pretty big milestone for us. It reflects the integrity of our organizational controls over the design of our systems, our business continuity, disaster recovery, and security and privacy rules,” said Walker. “It’s another trust factor when we’re dealing with large enterprises.”
Verify Customer Information in Real Time
Melissa Data can autocomplete and verify postal addresses for more than 240 countries, saving time and keystrokes, and ensuring that only valid information enters your database.
Its Global Email Cloud Service helps improve e-mail deliverability so customers can minimize bounce-backs and avoid blacklisting. The service provides a flexible range of data quality operations including the ability to add domain names, specify misspelling fixes, standardize casing of e-mail addresses, and identify invalid domain names for suppression. It also enables customers to manage various e-mail datasets with different levels of validation. Using the Global Email Cloud Service, enterprises can eliminate 95% of bad data in master customer data files.
“The Global Email Service protects businesses with flexible, cascading data-quality features including basic spelling and syntax, domain-level verification, and individual e-mail box deliverability,” said Walker. “It improves the ROI of direct marketing efforts.”
Melissa Data’s global contact data verification capabilities are also ideal for CRM, call center, and e-commerce applications. In the CRM space, tools are available for JD Edwards, Oracle Business Suite, PeopleSoft, Siebel, and Salesforce.
Understand What Your Data Can Do
Optimal business outcomes depend on clean data, but it can be very difficult to determine what condition the data is in. Melissa Data’s Data Profiler helps organizations discover existing weaknesses in their databases so they can create and enforce business rules on incoming records to maintain data quality. Using Melissa Data’s flexible API, businesses can monitor, measure and analyze data. The C++ API includes Windows and Linux libraries so it can be integrated easily into custom applications. It provides three levels of data analysis, including general formatting, content analysis and field analysis.
“Not only can you normalize, cleanse and verify data, but assess it and come up with a game plan. You can set thresholds by which the data is checked for consistency and integrity in real time as daily loads or as data transactions are completed,” said Walker. “It’s integrated with lots of other applications, directly in the database, wherever you want.”
Significantly, the data profiler can be used for any kind of data: customer data: customer transactions as well as non-customer data.
“The first foray into non-customer-centric data has been accomplished with our assessment tool and the data profilers, but now we’re looking into product domains and looking across domains of cleansing and validation for any kind of data—normalizing and cleaning data whether it’s dates and times, sales data, numeric data, product data, product hierarchies, and more,” said Walker. “We’re focused on being a data-quality solution, so we’re expanding that area and we’ll continue to do more integrations.”
For more information about Melissa Data and its data quality solutions, visit www.melissadata.com.
