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While the agreement gives IBM the right to use the technology patented by 3Com, and vice versa, it is not automatic that the companies can crank out new SKUs immediately."I have to figure out the work with my development team and express it in a physical entity," Baker said. "But it allows us to use products in the future, with no concern [over violating legal boundaries]."For example, 3Com last year was awarded a patent for a "Media connector cheap tiffany bangles for use with a PCMCIA-architecture communications card," he said.For most issuers, the brass ring to reach for in the next couple of years is the customer-centric business model. Customer-centric means the organization has a complete picture of customers and their stages of life, but it does not stop there.A truly customer-centric organization knows what the customer wants, and tailors products to match those desires.

It appears that while most issuers are doing what could be termed "super targeted" marketing and are moving toward the coveted "segment of one," they still are stalled in product-centric mode when it comes to matching product to person.or good reason, issuer focus has been on the data warehouse for a number of years, as they seek to translate data into strategy and strategy into action.The Emergence Of The VLDBIssuers are seeking to optimize the lifetime value of their customers -- by tapping better prospects for acquisition; incenting profitable cardholders to use the card and stay with the program; and moving delinquent cardholders into cheap tiffany cufflinks appropriate segment for collection quicker; and sometimes letting the least profitable drop out of the portfolio altogether.

All of these activities require larger cheap tiffany bracelets of data, and therefore bigger data warehouses; "very large databases" (VLDB) to be exact.A VLDB is defined as a data warehouse that contains more than a terabyte of data - something unheard of until recently, but now they are increasingly becoming more common.What is not common is an issuer having the internal knowledge of how to manage them."The immense data warehouse is a new animal," says Richard Winter, president of the Winter Corp. in Waltham, Mass., a consulting firm that focuses specifically on VLDBs.Winter and his co-author, Judith Davis, just published a white paper advocating testing VLDBs to reduce financial risk.

Many companies, such as credit card issuers, are in the process of implementing data warehouses that contain 10 terabytes of data. "A couple of years ago, that was almost unthinkable," Winter says.Feeding The Need For Data"The forces of competition are driving companies toward business intelligence solutions that involve more and more involved data," Winter says.However, while issuers may be moving beyond the frontier of established database technology, they likely will face significant risks associated with the sheer volume of data.The integration of credit management into the marketing process is a main driver of this trend."I think that what's going on in a lot of businesses is the integration of previously disparate business functions. That's where a lot of the value of data warehousing comes from," Winter says.cheap tiffany earrings marker of a natural progression toward larger volumes of data is in the general shift in the financial services market toward more integrated financial solutions.As financial services conglomerates form, "that's where the interesting new dynamics are coming from," Winter says. They need to see their customers as a total entity across multiple product and service delivery channels.Test, Or Take A $50 Million RiskIn the recent past, a company would hire a team of data warehouse professionals to create the system and start it running."But 90 percent of data warehouses are much smaller. The team's experience is based on handling warehouses that are no bigger than a few hundred gigabytes," says Winter. "They won't know exactly what happens when you load cheap tiffany key rings terabyte of data into the system."Test the system before the implementation is considered finished."Most companies do not find out what happens to a system with that kind of volume until the end," Winter says. "They don't know until the $30 million budgeted for data warehouse development is spent."