DSI News - 2010
DSI Reports Strong 2009
Jeff Fowler, President
January 4, 2010
In the face of a severe economic climate, 2009 was one of our best years ever. Gross sales improved by 22.5% over 2008, with a very strong carryover going into 2010. We currently project increased growth for 2010 in the neighborhood of 15-20%.
On the product side, our year began in the spring with a successful rollout of MarketWide 3.0, a comprehensive release which had been two years in the making. Among other things, 3.0 featured a rewritten kernel based on Microsoft’s .NET architecture. This was followed up in the fall by version 3.1, which introduced multiwave campaigns and seedlist support.
The service side of our business also performed very well, as we continued to expand our integrated e-marketing capabilities. These include email pushes with capture of opens/bounces/clickthrus, maintaining a near-perfect sender score, adding dashboard reports, online surveys, and web development. All these services are directly linked into marketing database platforms with no middleware involved, and function in real time. We became a Safe Harbor company in 2009, providing better data security for our hosted clients. Lastly, several extremely large database projects have been approved, the bulk of which will take place in 2010.
The biggest reason for 2009’s success was our commitment to open architecture, real time solutions. Businesses today simply cannot afford to wait days or weeks for data to become available to react upon. Our SQL-based solutions also offer clients much greater ROI than proprietary ones, as there are fewer ”moving parts“ to manage and reduced hardware requirements. And MarketWide’s unique ”one-pass“ technology provides terrific performance compared to traditional SQL query segmentation systems.
For the coming year, our MarketWide roadmap includes seamless email integration and powerful campaign enhancements. In fact, the next version of MarketWide will contain more features and enhancements than any product release we’ve ever had. We will also continue to strengthen and enhance our service offerings, as current projects include features such as real time web services and browser based access to consumers, allowing them to securely review and modify their data within the marketing database.
To our customers and partners, I offer you a heartfelt thanks for your loyalty and business. I speak for all of us at Decision Software when I say we appreciate the opportunity to work with you and be a part of your success. Our best wishes for a prosperous 2010!
- Jeff
DSI News - 2009
Give the Gift of DSI
December 4, 2009
It’s hard to believe that it’s Christmas already. It seems like it was only just summer! While the rest of us can’t believe that 2009 is almost over, for anyone involved with online retail, December is passing by even faster. The National Retail Foundation is predicting $28.8 billion dollars in online sales this holiday season. With time short and transactions flooding in, this holiday season highlights the need for a speedy solution. If you’ve followed this space, you’re aware that MarketWide provides real-time data access for your marketing campaigns. And that’s certainly important for anyone using the email channel. But that’s only part of the emarketing process. Don’t settle for just sending email, understand what happens after it gets delivered.
To accurately and successfully market in the online space, you need response information as quickly as possible. As soon as an email blast occurs, there are instantly hard bounces, soft bounces, clickthrus and more. Each action needs to be recorded, matched to a customer, and available on the database. When working with email, you can’t wait a week for data to be loaded or a day for a campaign tool to synch with your database. That’s why we wanted to let you know about DSI’s Christmas present to e-marketers: real-time online marketing. For our hosted clients, DSI provides:
- Instant or triggered MarketWide campaigns
- User-defined email blasts sent using feeds from MarketWide
- Sender scores consistently ranked in the high 90s
- Real-time updates to the database from our email blast system
- Optional survey follow-ups depending on the response
- A web-based consumer solicit preference center
- Browser based reports
Imagine segmenting your customer base, sending an email blast, and watching the results come back in real time, then using the information to begin planning a follow-up campaign with new targeted incentives. Not only do we make that possible, we make it easy. That’s why we’re proud that our solution is helping our customers end up on lists like Fortune’s 100 Fastest Growing Companies.
Everyone knows how rough the last 18 months have been, but markets are improving. Just as 2009’s online sales were bigger than 2008’s, expect an even bigger 2010. It’s time to prepare and simplify your processes so you can hit the ground running. Successful database and e-marketing strategies are not just about the solution, but also about the provider. Avoid group calls with multiple vendors and long email chains trying to implement a simple marketing program. With DSI as your host, you only have to deal with a single company.
This Christmas, give your marketing team a real time, comprehensive solution! Give me a call at (301) 459-9000 x 107, or email eblack@dsoftware.biz and we’ll get started.
MarketWide Continues to Improve
August 27th, 2009
Though MarketWide 3.0 provides a great deal of innovative additions to our modules, including Multiwave functionality and more efficient and secure data processing, we’re already hard at work on new features for the next revision of our MarketWide software. Here’s just some of what we have in the pipeline for MarketWide 3.1:
MarketWide 3.1 Features
Enhanced Network Performance - While many campaign management systems require 3rd party solutions to provide remote access to the data, MarketWide uses your existing Internet connection to let you run data mining queries, marketing campaigns, and reports directly against your data, just as if it were on your local computer! MarketWide 3.1 enhances this ability by introducing something called a ”Client-Side Communicator" process, that lets multiple MarketWide applications share a single connection to the server without any negative impact on performance! The upside of this is:
- Client applications open much faster, as they no longer have to establish an independent connection to the host. Instead they use the connection already opened by the Client Communicator.
- There are fewer Windows firewall access prompts, since only the main window and the Client Communicator require connections.
Improved Catalog Management – MarketWide uses an internal ”catalog“ that acts as a local snapshot of your database, without actually storing the data. This catalog describes your database to MarketWide so it knows how to create queries for your reports or campaigns. Previously, when a change was made to the database, users had to close and restart their MarketWide applications in order to see the change. Under MarketWide 3.1, you can continue working in all applications even when the database has been modified.
Load Balancing - The success of MarketWide has introduced an unexpected but positive problem. At times, so many people try to run queries that the server begins to bog down. To alleviate this, MarketWide 3.1 boasts a new ”task queue,“ whereby it can govern the number of queries allowed to run at the same time. The size of this queue can be adjusted by an Administrator to "throttle" the number of tasks that can be run simultaneously on the host. Once this threshold is reached, additional queries display a status message of "Queued(n)", where "n" represents the task's position number in the queue. As actively running queries complete, tasks are removed from the queue and allowed to run.
Maintenance Options – On occasion, a user may try to run a query while their database is being updated. This usually produces undesirable results and an unhappy user. To alleviate this, two enhancements have been added to MarketWide 3.1:
- A MarketWide administrator can "disable" a realm. This causes MarketWide to ”hold“ queries submitted by users until the realm has been re-enabled.
- An option has been added to the Scheduler module that allows users to request that a scheduled item wait for an email confirmation message before running. This helps you manage the timing of MultiWave campaigns.
More updates are sure to follow. Check back with us for more updates on exciting features still to come.
MarketWide's Automation Bulks Up
July 2nd, 2009
MarketWide has always been at the forefront of campaign automation. For years, we’ve been handling tricky scenarios like batch execution and email triggering. Plus, we never sacrifice our other functionality, such as one-pass-processing or promotion history updating. Still, at DSI we’re constantly looking to improve our customers’ day-to-day lives in the marketing world. That’s why we’re currently improving our engine to handle even heavier workloads.
One of the most exciting improvements is the new throttling feature, which allows users to specify the number of jobs a MarketWide Host processes at one time. You may have heard the term ”throttling“ before, especially if you’re doing any email marketing. That’s right. MarketWide is being improved to mirror the needs of other applications, such as email blast engines. After all, we want MarketWide to continue to be the tool that fits you, not the tool you have to fit yourself around.
To find out more about our upcoming enhancements, or features currently implemented in MarketWide, contact sales@dsoftware.biz
CLEAR Database Design!
June 12th, 2009
While DSI is primarily known for our MarketWide software solution, we've been designing databases almost as long as we've been writing software. With his years of experience, our president Jeff Fowler has lots of insight into marketing database design. Jeff has taken time out his schedule to update his white paper discussing business to consumer (B-C) database design using a technique called CLEAR. Whether you're looking for strategies on building your own marketing database or you'd like to know what DSI's hosting services can do for your marketing needs, take a look.
DSI Reports Solid First Quarter Results
May 5th, 2009
Decision Software announces its first quarter 2009 results, reporting solid top line and strong bottom line growth. Gross sales for the period January 1 through March 31 improved by 8% over the same period in 2008. Net sales for the same period improved by 23%. Neither of these figures include troubled receivables deemed to become likely bad debt. Including those receivables, the top line/bottom line improvements are 15.6% and 57.56%, respectively.
In addition, DSI rolled out its long awaited MarketWide™ 3.0 architecture, rewritten on top of Microsoft’s .NET framework and featuring multiwave campaigns, a new reporting engine, a significantly faster internal database engine, and numerous other improvements.
”While we’re not ready to pop the champagne cork, I’m cautiously optimistic that we’ve battened down our hatches sufficiently to survive the current economic rough patch, and are well-positioned to emerge with a powerful, cost-effective solution set for today’s marketers,“ says president and founder Jeff Fowler. ”The database hosting side of our business has been very strong for us, and our major clients are all signed to multi-year contracts. We’re excited about our new partnership with Creative Automation, and our other service bureau partners continue to expand and add new MarketWide clients, providing us with a constant revenue stream that allows us to continually improve our software.“
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Creative Automation Partners with DSI
May 1, 2009
DSI is pleased to welcome our newest partner, Creative Automation, to the MarketWide family. As a leading marketing database company, Creative Automation is well positioned to support multi-channel marketers, an arena where MarketWide excels. Under terms of the partnership, Creative Automation will be using MarketWide to perform marketing campaigns on behalf of their clients. They will be taking advantage of MarketWide 3.0’s new multi-wave segmentation, enhanced campaign response analysis and automated batch processing.
To find out more about Creative Automation, check out our Partners page. For more information on MarketWide 3.0 or a live demonstration of the software, contact us.
Brian Ashbaugh Completes Microsoft
SQL Certification Program
April 27, 2009
Our own Brian Ashbaugh completed the Microsoft SQL Certification Program, giving him the right to use the title, Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist with training in SQL Server 2005! Congratulations to Brian! We thank him for his commitment to constantly improve his job skills, and for strengthening the operations team at DSI
 
Welcome to Our New Look!
April 1, 2009
If you’ve been following the website, you’ll know that MarketWide 3.0 is in full release. Internal production machines have been going since January and February brought the first partner conversions from MarketWide 2.1 to MarketWide 3.0. Since our customers and partners are enjoying the brand new interface and faster performance, we knew we needed a slick new website to keep up.
Please feel free to click around, you’ll find many of the pages with updated content. And keep coming back in the coming weeks, there will be new MarketWide 3.0 information, screenshots of our enhanced MarketWide interface, and maybe even some exciting information about what’s coming next from DSI. Pardon our dust as we make this website better and your life easier!
MarketWide 3.0 is Up and
Running in the New Year!
February 2, 2009
Though the year has just begun, we've been hard at work, refining our services behind the scenes to constantly improve them. Since we use our own software on behalf of our clients, we're always looking for ways to improve how it works. Speaking of our clients, a major new online retail client that we recently visited is beginning production this week! Our installation and training session was a resounding success, and the client was amazed with MarketWide's speedy performance. With MarketWide 3.0, they're able to run campaigns consisting of 20+ segments against 9MM transactions in 30 to 40 seconds! In addition, we are now hosting their consumer preference center and web surveys, offering a completely enclosed and self-sustaining solution. We've also been actively working on updating our internal MarketWide 2.1 systems to MarketWide 3.0, making sure users and queries convert seamlessly to prevent any information from being lost. After all, in-house testing on production systems is the best way for us to ensure a smooth transition for our existing 2.1 installations! We'll keep you posted with more developments in the coming weeks ahead, so check back often!
Happy New Year from DSI
January 10, 2009
As we begin the new year here at DSI, we look forward to implementing the exciting changes we have in store. From our brand new MarketWide 3.0 software, to our continued dedication to our services and clients, it's clear 2009 will be a busy year that's full of potential. We're excited to continue enhancing our services to better suit your needs. Even through turbulent times, we'll be here doing what we do best! We wish you a happy 2009 from all of us here at DSI.
DSI News – 2008
DSI Attends NCDM in Orlando, Florida
December 19, 2008
This year's NCDM show, held at the Gaylord Palms in sunny Orlando, Florida, was a blast! We were able to show off our new MarketWide 3.0 software to the world, attend some informative sessions, and enjoy the sunshine. There was even time for a nice stroll through Downtown Disney. As usual, any break from the chilly D.C. winter weather is always welcome! As exciting as this was for us, there's plenty more in store for 2009. Be sure to check back in January for the full production release of MarketWide 3.0!
DSI: Stable In Good Times and Bad
By Jeff Fowler
October 28, 2008
Given the state of the economy, it’s more important than ever to know that you’re working with a partner who’ll be there when you need them. Far too many vendors live from paycheck to paycheck, relying on venture capital dollars and short term financing in order to meet payroll. When asked about their long-term stability, these companies evasively rattle off glossy statistics about revenue, installations and strategic partnerships. As I’ve said many times: at the end of the year, companies have to make more than they spend or ultimately they fail. Over the years we’ve seen competitors come along and do a few sub-margin deals to gain market share, pick up a few references, and roll out press releases, and generally make great fanfare, but eventually they have to charge enough to support themselves, or they disappear as so many have done.
DSI is a stable, debt-free and profitable company. Heading into the final quarter, our sales have increased 4% over last year, our two largest clients have just renewed their contracts, we continue to add new clients while holding on to existing ones, and we’ve just announced a major upgrade to our MarketWide software. We have nearly two decades of experience, so we've been through periods of financial upheaval before. We recognize the importance of reliability, which is why we’ve positioned ourselves for steady growth. This year’s results are an excellent example of that wisdom in practice.
After all, no one wants to see their vendor in "feast or famine" mode. Financial instability leads to questionable decisions, or turning control over to investors who may not have the customer's best interests at heart. DSI's ”software as a service“ license provides us with reliable recurring revenue, as does our database hosting service. We have avoided investors and carefully mapped out a long-term product plan to keep our software both fundamentally sound and economical. All of this planning lets us stay true to our philosophy: provide quality campaign management software at a reasonable price. As time has shown, whether it's software, database services, or financial health, you can rely on DSI to be stable even in turbulent times.
Multi-wave is here!
By Eli Black
August 4, 2008
It doesn’t take long reading the news to see that costs are going up. The cost of food, the cost of gas, the cost of living, all these contribute to an environment where consumers are less likely to spend. With customers less and less likely to part with their money, successful marketing becomes harder and harder. Gone are the days where blanket mailings were cost effective. Now success takes more strategy, more complexity, and more work. To combat this, DSI has focused on using our MarketWide 3.0 release to ease the burden of campaign management.
While we can’t predict the market changes currently taking place, we do recognize the need to provide software that’s flexible, sophisticated, and real-time. When we released MarketWide 1.0 in 2004, we did so anticipating the way that the Internet was changing communication, and now with MarketWide 3.0 we’ve added the following features:
- In order to support campaigns with a comprehensive multi-effort strategy, PromoTrak now lets marketers build out several waves of criteria at once. These waves can be linked and coded at the same time, giving the user a one-stop location to build an entire mailing strategy. Each effort also becomes a chance to build on previous solicitations. The follow up efforts might be a survey sent to non-responders asking for their opinion on the solicit they received. It might be an increased incentive for certain demographics. Perhaps it’s a reminder about an offer about to expire. Whatever the reason behind a multi-solicit strategy, PromoTrak handles the complexity of such campaigns using simple point-and-click dialogs.
- Obviously multi-wave campaigns require a set of criteria for each wave, but they also require time management. A crucial part of a marketing strategy is the timing of a contact. Instead of making marketers manually juggle the running and scheduling of future efforts, MarketWide contains a simple effort dialog:
- This dialog avoids frustrating hard coded dates and times, working instead using elapsed days since a previous effort. In turn, this flexibility anticipates production timetable change or delays, so that there’s no need to spend time recoding the entire strategy. Simply adjust the appropriate effort and MarketWide will update any other affected waves. Although reaching the consumer takes more work than ever, MarketWide makes automation easy.
- There’s nothing more frustrating that rebuilding. Anyone in a position of building marketing segmentation has better things to do than sit and repeat work they’ve done before. DSI recognizes that, which is why marketers now have the ability to embed criteria into their PromoTrak templates. Want to include the appropriate excludes with your email campaigns? PromoTrak can do it automatically. And now it’s no problem to have control groups pre-built when you start a direct mail campaign! No one wants to waste time doing the same task over and over again. Now with PromoTrak, you don’t have to.
When you tie these new features in with MarketWide’s traditional staples such as infinite segmentation and one-pass processing, it’s easy to see why DSI has been proudly providing industrial strength campaign management for over a decade. With MarketWide 3.0, all of this functionality is ready to be deployed, saving you time and money and letting you capitalize on opportunities.
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