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September 17, 2003

Closed Loop

Open Competition

Sanjay Murthi reinforces a problematic misconception about open source software when he suggests that a business would have to release proprietary business logic modifications to competitors ("Fast, Better, Cheaper," Strategic Knowledge, July 18, 2003). Although many different licenses are employed in the open source community, the general public license (GPL), which applies to a lot of open source software, does not specifically require this. In fact, to quote from www.gnu.org:

"The GPL does not require you to release your modified version. You are free to make modifications and use them privately, without ever releasing them. This applies to organizations (including companies), too; an organization can make a modified version and use it internally without ever releasing it outside the organization."

So, clearly, if you modify the source code of some open source software to give your organization a competitive advantage, you do not have to give that advantage away just because you started with open source software!

Berend Tober
Centerbrook, Conn.

Is Data Mining Next?

I found Hussain Sabri's article on CRM and data mining ("CRM: The Power of Prediction," July 18, 2003) to be highly informative.

There is a great need for data mining for business users. The catch-22 is that, until recently, data mining's user base has not included business executives.

Data mining's value is understood among executives. The cost and resources needed to apply it in a meaningful manner for daily business use, however, has been the showstopper. This situation is gradually changing with a slew of new products from CRM and traditional data-mining vendors.

The challenge for CRM and data mining vendors is to create data mining "happy paths," which can provide useful information even when data sets change, without needing to engage the intervention of specialists.

Online analytic processing and data visualization tools have succeeded in doing this and seen their comparative market shares increase. Data mining's turn is next, but getting there will require some innovative thinking by the vendors.

Hari Mailvaganam
Vancouver

Learning More

I found "CRM: The Power of Prediction" extremely informative and am interested in learning more about predictive analysis and modeling concepts, tools, and implementations.

Can you recommend any additional resources that may assist in "fast cycling" this learning process?

Philip Laster
Memphis, Tenn.

IE Responds:

IntelligentEnterprise.com offers several additional resource centers. Our IntelligentCRM community, BI information center, and research library are all excellent starting points for finding links, articles, and forums on predictive CRM systems and related topics.