ORLANDO, Fla., March 4, 2008 – Information Resources, Inc. (IRI) the world’s leading global provider of consumer, shopper, and retail market intelligence and insights today publicly unveiled IRI® Liquid Data (ILD), a breakthrough, new end-to-end information management and insights platform. ILD supports business applications designed to provide comprehensive real-time information to enterprise business decision-makers. The announcement was made at the 2008 IRI Reinventing CPG & Retail Summit being held at the Gaylord Palms Resort and Convention Center in Orlando, Fla., from March 3-5, 2008.
Developed in collaboration with IBM, ILD empowers today’s leading CPG, retail, and healthcare companies to re-imagine how their businesses fundamentally make decisions based on immediate access to strategic information and insights leveraging fully integrated data assets and redesigned workflows to predict the success of future decisions and initiatives to stay ahead of the competition.
“ILD is the first platform to fully enable a real-time, integrated information universe of marketplace and enterprise data for our industry,” said IRI Chairman Dr. Romesh Wadhwani. “These new capabilities empower the enterprise to use information as its ultimate strategic differentiator by quickly and easily revealing invaluable business insights hidden in their existing market data assets to uncover new business opportunities and, ultimately, a new competitive paradigm.”
The ILD platform offers next-generation data management capabilities driven through a unique combination of IBM and IRI hardware, software, patented algorithms, industry models, data integration, and supporting applications that are offered as a hosted service or as a separate infrastructure within the customer’s legacy data environment. Unlike traditional databases currently available today, the capability platform holds data in a flat or unstructured universe of points and leverages powerful, predictive automated analytics to generate information and insights to support specific decisions in minutes versus weeks or months.
With improved information, executives will gain better insights, drive better decisions, accelerate operations, and proactively position products and brands ahead of competing offerings. The solution begins with integrated marketplace and enterprise data and continues through workflow and process adjustments. This technology and approach addresses the vast shift in decision-making that results from the unprecedented flexibility and democratization of strategic information access.
Specific capabilities and benefits of the ILD platform include:
- Integrates marketplace data (including household panel, point-of-sale data and media data) with enterprise and business intelligence data (including promotional data and shipment data)
- Manages up to six years of market data and solves the related volume-processing problem
- Enables multiple hierarchy views of data across categories and types without changing the underlying data universe or creating a new database
- Manages all aggregations, calculations, and projections on the fly
- Makes available concise insights and information for use in other enterprise BI applications
- Drives down ongoing information management costs
Through an expanded relationship with IBM as the preferred ILD integration partner in CPG, IRI and IBM are uniquely positioned to deliver the real-time, reliable information executives need to understand today’s sophisticated consumer. The joint effort provides an end-to-end approach spanning needs evaluation, business requirements definition, cost-to-value balance for implementation, and guided organizational change management services to minimize risk and maximize return.
“Today's well informed, harder to reach, and increasingly skeptical consumer is presenting Consumer Products companies with a unique set of challenges,” said Steve Brown, Consumer Products Industry Leader, IBM. "Working with IRI, we are offering clients a holistic way to use information flexibly and to empower executives to make consumer-focused decisions.”
The ILD platform is delivered using IBM System x servers using the IBM Balance Configuration Warehouse solution. Also, IBM’s DB2 Viper database software is at the core of the solution. IBM’s Global Business Services will also integrate ILD into the client’s existing infrastructure and deliver industry-specific expertise.
“IBM is an immensely valuable business partner in offering companies the combined ILD platform and IBM’s robust processes and solutions,” added Dr. Wadhwani. “We are extremely pleased to be teaming with them to deliver an entirely new value equation to the marketplace.”
Specific capabilities and business applications available include:
- IRI Shopper Insights Explorer™ on ILD: A powerful analytic-driven application built on the ILD platform that enables businesses to uncover and act quickly on fact-based insights into shopper segments, trip missions, and buyer behavior.
- IRI Loyalty Analytics Collaboration™ on ILD: Providing rapid, flexible access to retailer loyalty data to support improved analytically-driven manufacturer and retailer collaboration for targeted customer-centric retail programs.
- IBM Preliminary Data Assessment Appliance for the ILD platform: A set of pre-built accelerators based on IBM Information Server designed to provide an early view of the source data prior to integration with Liquid Data. Cleansing the data prior to integration with the ILD Platform increases the credibility of the analysis while reducing project implementation time.
About Information Resources, Inc.
Information Resources, Inc. (IRI) is the world’s leading global provider of consumer, shopper, and retail market intelligence and insights, empowering consumer packaged goods (CPG), retail and healthcare companies to grow their business profitably in a complex marketplace, driving breakthrough growth in the industries it serves. The company’s portfolio of services, solutions, and technology enable leading retailers and their suppliers around the globe to see what they are missing, act faster with greater confidence and win at the shelf. Ninety-five percent of the FORTUNE Global 500 in CPG and retail leverage IRI to power their business. For more information, visit: http://www.infores.com.
# # #
IRI CONTACT:
John McIndoe
E-mail: john.mcindoe@infores.com
Phone: (312) 474-3862
Fax: (312) 474-2512