You've heard of too big to fail? In the world of business information, there's too big to be useful.
"It's called big data," says Jim Dunn, vice president of sales and marketing at Dynamite Data. "There's too much information to gather, organize and make sense of it all. And by the time you analyze it, it's too old."
Sorting it out is bringing rapid sales growth to the northern Nevada company.
Dynamite Data, a "virtual" company, with Dunn and Chairman Larry Barber both based in Reno, offers Channel Monitor, a tool for manufacturers and merchants to keep track of competitors' products as well as their own.
The tool falls into the software as a service category, known as SaaS, that operates in the so-called cloud where users can log on from anywhere. Data collected from it can be fed into business intelligence platforms from Oracle Corp., SAP and others.
Channel Monitor searches the Web sites of competitors and partners and gathers a variety of information including product pricing, stock status, rebate offers and terms of sale. It searches model and Universal Product Code numbers, model names and product specifications and keywords in the product description to ensure it is tracking comparable products.
The data is updated automatically twice a day or more often by a user. When a product manager, for example, logs onto the Channel Monitor dashboard it triggers a search, providing up to the minute data.
"It's a real-time pricing engine for manufacturers to see what the competition is charging and for channel management, and for the merchants to see what the guy down the street is selling," says Dunn. "You can track the channel for MAP violations, for example, to make sure they're selling at the minimum advertised price."
Another feature is called Where to Buy for manufacturers' web sites to display locations to buy their products at the best current prices. The company also has a free consumer browser add-on called Dynamite Deals, available at dynamitedeals.com, that lets consumers find the lowest priced products and helps refresh the company's own databases.
The company is initially targeting consumer electronics, a highly competitive industry in which most products are priced above $100 and prices change rapidly.
"Amazon sometimes changes their product pricing every half hour," says Dunn.
Dynamite Data's customers include online electronics retailers TigerDirect.com, Circuit City and CompUSA, all divisions of Systemax, Inc., as well as Sears, and drive manufacturers Western Digital and Seagate, and Brother Printers. In the first quarter of 2012, says Dunn, the company grew its customer base 50 percent.
The technology is based on web-extraction research done by Kris Kubicki at the University of Illinois. Kubicki hooked up with Barber, who saw the commercial potential of the research, and began writing code for what became Channel Monitor in 2007.
Dunn joined the start up and began selling the product in 2009 after settling in Reno six years earlier following a career in Silicon Valley at Apple Computer Inc. and other tech firms. He had been investing in real estate, but was lured out of retirement after the market took a nosedive.
The company now has 25 employees, including two additional sales people, customer service representatives and a slew of engineers led by Kubicki and all located in Chicago.
The company web site is located at www.dynamitedata.com.
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