Melissa Data, a provider of contact data quality and integration solutions, has announced the availability of Contact Zone, an open source data integration software optimized for sophisticated contact data quality. Contact Zone incorporates a streamlined graphical user interface enabling data transformations mapped from any type of source database to any type of data warehouse. According to Melissa Data, as organizations increasingly work to improve their operational costs, increase revenues and manage risks by capitalizing on their return on data, they are recognizing that the quality of the data itself is essential to making achieving those objectives.
With Contact Zone, users do not need the extensive programming skills or technical understanding of programming languages commonly required to integrate data quality tools. By applying a simple drag-and-drop tool through an intuitive visual interface, Contact Zone users easily target the data to be cleaned. U.S. and Canada addresses, phone numbers, and email addresses are easily parsed, validated and corrected for improved segmentation and targeting.
"It is a very elegant solution," Greg Brown, vice president of marketing at Melissa Data, tells 5 Minute Briefing. "All users really have to do is set up their source data, drag and drop the various tools that they want to use onto the workflow, and select an output," Brown explains. Contact Zone works with data in text files, Oracle, MS SQL Server, dBase, Excel, Salesforce, SAP, Access, XML, DB2, Informix, MySQL and other repositories.
Records are updated with U.S. and Canada change-of-address information to help companies stay in touch with moving customers, maximize postal discounts, and reduce undeliverable-as-addressed mail.
"Contact Zone is based on the open source Pentaho Data Integration technology and we have bolted on our data quality tool set so it becomes a very robust cleansing hub," Brown explains. "We continue to introduce new tools into it." Recently, fuzzy matching and record linkage capabilities were made available in the product, and soon, international data verification will be introduced for the product as well, he says.
Contact Zone is available on disk or via download at www.MelissaData.com/cz.