DWL Secures 'Visionary' Position in Gartners's First Magic Quadrant for Customer Data Integration

1 January 1970

DWL, the leader in customer data integration (CDI) software, today announced it has secured the 'visionary' position in Gartner Inc.'s first Magic Quadrant* for the CDI market, released April 20th, 2005. The report evaluates and positions 9 vendors in the CDI market based on key criteria, including the ability to execute and vision. DWL's comprehensive feature set and proven technology have earned them a place on the far right of the Magic Quadrant, as a technology leader. Given the early stage of this market, Gartner has not identified a leader in this quadrant.

Gartner defines CDI hubs as software products that support the global identification, linking and synchronization of customer information across heterogeneous data sources through semantic reconciliation of reference data. The hub creates and manages a central, database-based system of record, enabling the delivery of a single customer view.

Gartner's release of the Magic Quadrant for the CDI space serves as further validation that leading organizations are turning to very specific technology to address their need to gain an operational, single view of their customers to organizational units, channels and business partners. According to the report, the CDI market is still at an early stage, but will continue to grow rapidly during 2005. In order to become competitive, companies that lack a consistent and accurate single view of the customer should evaluate CDI products from top vendors, before trying to build such a system in-house.

According to Gartner, vendors in the visionary quadrant have a clear vision of market direction and are focused on preparing for that, but they can still improve in terms of optimizing service delivery. Gartner's report states that DWL is the most proven "transaction-style" CDI hub, with a number of solid references and scalability proof points. The report also says that the DWL Customer(TM) product is well-designed for a service-oriented architecture world, with a rich set of business services around the data model.

"Companies are seeing that their investments in CRM or platform-specific suites still do not provide the promised single, operational customer record for the entire organization. The market opportunity for DWL's neutral application, designed to deliver clean, consistent customer data to all CRM and operational systems as a 'service', has exploded," said John Baumstark, president and CEO, DWL. "The added recognition Gartner brings to this space and its validation of the market need for CDI is tremendously exciting for DWL and our customers."

Major companies such as MetLife and SunTrust have selected DWL Customer(TM) as their operational customer data hub. DWL's position in the visionary quadrant further demonstrates its technical leadership and expertise in designing a CDI software solution that is meeting a critical business need for today's leading organizations.

About DWL Customer(TM)

DWL Customer(TM) is the most robust customer master data hub on the market today. It maintains the single version of customer truth, going beyond simple cleansing and matching functions to be the single source of operational customer data management across the enterprise. It provides unique 'business services' to maintain the integrity of your customer data and can create new business opportunities through its complex customer event notification functions. In benchmarking tests, DWL Customer(TM) produced average response times in the 120 milli-second range with over 100 million customer records in the database and transaction volumes of close to 600,000 transactions per hour. Unlike front and back office application customer information files (CIFs) that cannot meet demanding performance requirements, DWL Customer(TM) was designed to perform in the most demanding performance environments, making it the leading CDI solution for leading organizations.

About DWL

DWL is the authoritative customer data integration (CDI) solution. DWL works with organizations worldwide to address enterprise-wide customer data integration (CDI) strategies using DWL Customer(TM), the most robust customer master data hub on the market. Based on a service-oriented architecture, DWL Customer(TM) provides organizations with the single source of their customer data across multiple product and business silos. It delivers this single, real-time view plus a set of unique business services to maintain and manage complex customer "events" to all channels and provides the foundation for a truly complete multi-channel integration and CRM strategy.

Founded in 1996, DWL is headquartered in Atlanta and has offices in New York, Boston, Chicago, Toronto, St. Louis, London, Sao Paulo and Kuala Lumpur. DWL clients include SunTrust, MetLife, Citi Cards, Atlantic Blue Cross Care, Empire Financial, Nationwide Insurance and UnumProvident.

DWL has strategic relationships with IBM, Acxiom, Ascential, and other leading data quality and ETL (extract, transform and load) vendors. Technology partners include IBM, Hewlett Packard, BEA Systems, Oracle and Sun Microsystems. Key systems integrator relationships include IBM Business Consulting Services, Bearing Point, Business Edge and Accenture. DWL has been recognized by Deloitte as one of the fastest growing technology companies in North America for three consecutive years and by leading analyst groups including META, Forrester and Gartner as a leader in the customer data integration solution space.

DWL is a registered trademark of DWL Inc.

The Magic Quadrant is copyrighted April 20, 2005 by Gartner, Inc. and is reused with permission. The Magic Quadrant is a graphical representation of a marketplace at and for a specific time period. It depicts Gartner's analysis of how certain vendors measure against criteria for that marketplace, as defined by Gartner. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in the Magic Quadrant, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors placed in the "Leaders" quadrant. The Magic Quadrant is intended solely as a research tool, and is not meant to be a specific guide to action. Gartner disclaims all warranties, express or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

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Contact:
DWL Incorporated
Karen Jay, 416-364-2045
kjay@dwl.com

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Source: DWL