SAN FRANCISCO - International Business Machines Corp. has expanded its line of data-mining software to help banks and other businesses to make better use of their information warehouses.
Data mining, increasingly popular at banks, is the process of digging through and manipulating information held on core systems to learn more about customers and profitability.
The new IBM software, dubbed Visual Warehouse, is based on local area networks. The system allows for small-scale data-mining jobs that are cheaper and quicker to get off the ground than the larger projects that predominate now, IBM officials said.
They said smaller projects will appeal to financial institutions and other conservative businesses that want to dip a toe into this new technology before immersing themselves in it.
Visual Warehouse is intended for data stores a fraction of the size of those run on enterprise server.
The software can handle about 50 billion bytes of data, versus the trillions of bytes handled by more powerful systems.
But the smaller scale has cost benefits. A fully loaded Visual Warehouse costs an average of $32,500, compared to $200,000 to $250,000 for the larger systems, according to David R. Disney, manager of advanced technologies for IBM's finance industry division.
Visual Warehouse is currently being tested by three banks: one regional and two money-centers, one of which is in New York. These institutions are using the systems to better focus their marketing and cross-selling efforts.
Aside from this scaled-down version of its data-mining tools, Big Blue also announced a services initiative to help customers unearth scraps of data that might have been missed before.
