Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence for E-Commerce

You go online to buy a digital camera. Soon, you realize you've bought a more expensive camera than intended, along with extra batteries, charger, and graphics software-all at the prompting of the retailer.

Happy with your purchases? The retailer certainly is, and if you are too, you both can be said to be the beneficiaries of "customer intimacy" achieved through the transformation of data collected during this visit or stored from previous visits into real business intelligence that can be exercised in real time.

Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence for e-Commerce is a practical exploration of the technological innovations through which traditional data warehousing is brought to bear on this and other less modest e-commerce applications, such as those at work in B2B, G2C, B2G, and B2E models. The authors examine the core technologies and commercial products in use today, providing a nuts-and-bolts understanding of how you can deploy customer and product data in ways that meet the unique requirements of the online marketplace-particularly if you are part of a brick-and-mortar company with specific online aspirations. In so doing, they build a powerful case for investment in and aggressive development of these approaches, which are likely to separate winners from losers as e-commerce grows and matures.

Alan Simon is a leading authority on data warehousing and database technology. He is the author of 26 books, including the previous edition of this book and the forthcoming Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence for e-Commerce, available from Morgan Kaufmann Publishers in early 2001. He currently provides data warehousing-related consulting services to clients.

Steven L. Shaffer is currently specializing in the e-business technology market and was formerly the director of sales for Belenos, Inc., a firm specializing in providing e-business and network infrastructure services to the service provider marketplace. He was also formerly a vice president with SSDS, Inc., a Denver-based security and systems integration firm, and a branch manager with Sprint e-Solutions. Mr. Shaffer is currently a senior manager at Sprint.