Competitors unite over customer data

About 25 e-business application vendors today announced plans to develop a vendor-neutral way to create, store, and exchange customer marketing data. The Customer Profile Exchange (CPEX) work group aims release an open standard for transmitting customer information across applications and systems and guarding privacy.

Charter members include Andromedia/Macromedia, Calico Commerce, Cogit, Compaq, Digital Impact, DoubleClick, Engage Technologies, Fujitsu Software Corp., Harte-Hanks, IBM, InsWeb, Intuit, Lumeria, Marketsoft, Net Perceptions, net.Genesis, Oracle, Personify, Siebel Systems, Sun/Netscape Alliance, and Vignette Corp. Others that have expressed interest in joining the CPEX effort include Lucent Technologies CRM Solutions, Proxicom and U.S. Interactive.

The CPEX standard will integrate online and offline customer data in an XML-based data model for use within various enterprise applications both on and off the Web. CPEX will include a data model, transport and query definitions, plus a framework for protecting privacy.

Few of today's supply and demand chains share a unified image of the customer, leaving customer support, order management, lead sharing, and other business functions working independently, the partners said. "Access to complete and up-to-date customer information is still the exception, not the norm, in most businesses today," said Philip Russom, director of the business intelligence knowledge center at Hurwitz Group. "Many e-Businesses are struggling to integrate customer data housed in diverse IT systems·because the integration can help them be more effective at upselling, cross-selling, and customer retention."

CPEX was chartered and launched this month by Vignette Corp. The first CPEX specifications are expected to be available in the first half of 2000, with demos following.

More information on CPEX will be available soon at www.cpex.org.