Information Management's 2009 Innovative Solution Awards

The Innovative Solution Awards recognize solutions that are groundbreaking and provide quantifiable business value across this interdependent market.

Download 2009 award guidelines here.

Please send your complete entries, including the submission, contact information and certification page to Adrienne Baker.

2009 Award Winners

This award was created to recognize solutions that are groundbreaking and provide quantifiable business value within the topical areas we cover. Innovation is about relevance to changing business demands. These winning implementations involve innovative technology rollouts or the introduction of a new approach or use of technology in a company or an industry.

Category: Data Management

Peachtree Data Inc.
with SAP BusinessObjects
Peachtree Data Inc., a marketing list cleansing company, was outsourcing data to a third party to be processed. With SAP BusinessObjects, the task can now be preformed in-house, giving Peachtree total control over its customers’ data and consistent coding. In 12 months, the company recovered its full investment costs. In the past, it took Peachtree sevn to 10 days to process a single client mailing list. Now, the same file can be processed in five to 10 minutes.

The solution is tied closely to cost savings, ROI and customer satisfaction. It has a note of security and compliance in not exposing data to third parties. – Jim Ericson

Category: Enterprise Content Management

National Geographic Society
with Virtusa Corporation
National Geographic had to rethink its global Web strategy to confront the fact that business models are shifting from consumers willing to pay for the content to consumers expecting free or sponsored content. The company looked to Virtusa to drive down the cost of creating new content, efficiently utilize their existing assets and leverage digital media to focus on newer revenue generating streams. Through the implementation of Vignette ECM Center-of-Excellence, National Geographic: reduced content management usability costs by 50 percent; increased maximum number of concurrent connections five-fold; reduced Web site support costs by more than 60 percent; and reduced gallery creation time from two and a half hours to 15 minutes.

This is a well-rounded approach to ECM. The implementation addressed many dimensions of the problem. – Julie Langenkamp

Category: Data Warehousing

Database Emailer
with Infobright
Database Emailer is an Internet marketing company that sells full record, targeted, opt-in email data. The company was experiencing data volume so large (150 million email records and counting) that the company’s IT department was becoming overburdened managing it all. After deploying Infobright, Database Emailer doubled the amount of data available for customers to query, saved up to 25 IT man-hours a day in time used to run queries, reduced Web site query turnaround time from seven minutes to 10 seconds and doubled the rate of new customers.

This open source analytic data warehouse made use of innovative, self-managing technology to handle fast, complex queries with massive amounts of data. – Julie Langenkamp

Category: Performance Management

British Telecom
with Knoa Software
British Telecom was faced with a business challenge to dramatically scale-up the end-user population of its customer relationship management application, increasing its number of defined users from 8,000 to 16,000. The end-user monitoring and management provided by Knoa EPM gave British Telecom much needed visibility, enabling the company to uncover and proactively resolve problems that would otherwise extend transaction times and impact end-users, using nontraditional measures to monitor its call center agents.

One of the most outstanding aspects of this solution was the measurement of call center agent productivity – William McKnight

Category: Business Intelligence and Analytic Applications

The Venetian Resort-Hotel-Casino
with SAS
The Venetian and The Palazzo are maximizing the value of a highly perishable product using SAS marketing and operations solutions. The Las Vegas properties are able to keep occupancy up regardless of the ebb and flow of the economy or seasons. Each property’s success starts with customer profitability calculations. By looking at a customer’s past stays, activity on the casino floor and purchases in other parts of the hotel, SAS creates a forecast of what the customer is likely to spend on the next visit by digging into the data of an individual customer and predicting the value the customer will have on the next trip.

This is a smart business application. It is the effective utilization of the most sophisticated form of analytics to cut costs and improve resource allocation. – Stephan Kudyba

Category: Data Integration

U.S. Auto Parts Network, Inc. with Omniture, An Adobe company
With the Web as it’s only retail channel, U.S. Auto Parts (USAP) needed to ensure that every visitor on its e-commerce site was engaged. The company’s robust email marketing program was unable to measure campaigns alongside other marketing initiatives. USAP deployed Omniture, triggering remarketing messages to “cart abandoners” by reminding them about products still in their shopping cart. The email reminders linked back to the abandoned cart with added incentive to complete the purchase through a 10 percent discount. USAP saw revenue per email and transaction rates increase by 50 times, bounce rates decrease by 60 percent and clickthrough rates increase 18 times. Email subscriptions also nearly tripled after launching the integration.

Harnessing email information for marketing efforts is innovative. This sort of thing is not done well often. – William Laurent

Category: Other

Information Systems and Services at The George Washington University
with VMware
Information Systems and Services (ISS) at The George Washington University identified two major issues that required effective sustainability solutions: rising utility costs and an increasing carbon footprint. With VMware, ISS delivered a repertoire of sustainable IT practices that have defined the university’s sustainability mission. For example, ISS virtualized approximately 38 percent of its total server environment, saving 700,000 kilowatt-hours, which translates to taking 60 cars off the road; old servers and data center systems were replaced with new energy-efficient machines, decreasing energy use by nearly 60 percent; and ISS reduced the number of physical servers by consolidating electronic administrative documents into a central storage area.

George Washington University and VMware combined four solutions for sustainable IT that produced strong strategic and cultural results, substantially lowering their environmental impact – Julie Langenkamp