Development on the March at NDS

May 3 - When VNU Marketing Information Services acquired National Decision Systems (NDS) in 1997, the move was seen as merely a part of the consolidation in the data industry, a step whose principal result would be rationalization in staffs. Some even predicted that NDS would "fade away" into Claritas. Instead, NDS's new parent energized a major investment in development resources at the company. And after 18 months of intensive work, this development team has created the core of what will be a new generation of products at NDS, and quite possibly at Claritas and other members of VNU's Precision Marketing Group.

Last month, NDS released the first product of this effort, iMark Express. iMark Express is a browser-based product written in Java which is designed to spatially analyze data and to create maps and reports. Customer's purchase iMark Express with an assortment of NDS consumer and business databases. The Express version of iMark will replace NDS' InfoMark Express and EasySite products.

NDS markets proprietary databases and associated software. Their principal targets are the real estate, restaurant, retail, non-profit and catalog industries. (Fellow VNU company Claritas focuses on automotive, financial services, media, telecommunications and utilities.)

iMark's development has been led by Ray Major, VP of Product Management at NDS. From the beginning it was intended as an intranet or internet centered product, but with relatively "full" functionality not available in HTML alone. It was also determined early on that the use of any proprietary back end database was to be avoided. This pair of specifications and others led to the decision to develop the core program in Java, and to structure the back end around Oracle databases.

Ray Major

Major assembled virtually an entirely new development team for this effort. The range of required skills was daunting: Java developers, Oracle developers, cartography experts. Only one programmer is now left at NDS from the pre-VNU days. Eventually a dozen developers worked over a year on iMark, with the assistance of six full-time Q&A staff, five documentation writers, and product managers. Quite an effort for a putatively "stodgy" database company!

Since iMark Express (and its sister products to come) is a browser-based product designed for intranet/internet use, many other aspects of NDS' organization were affected, some radically so. Q&A, for instance, was now testing a server-based rather than a desktop product. The sales force now has to address the concerns of customers' IT departments.

NDS' choice of Java as a development platform is a significant step away from typical mapping-enabled data products. Such products have until now been delivered "on top of" a desktop mapping product such as MapInfo Professional or ESRI's ArcView; or else developed with the OCX programming tools marketed by mapping software vendors like Blue Marble Geographics, ESRI, or MapInfo. Until now, for instance, Claritas delivered mapping to its clients via MapInfo technology, and NDS used ESRI's ArcView. When MapInfo moved last fall to break its alliance with Claritas (see MapInfo, Claritas Diverge on the Demographic Landscape, the Claritas mapping business seemed headed for ESRI.

VNU started out as a Dutch publishing company in 1964. By the 1970's it had moved into the business information field, and in the late 1980's entered the US market. In addition to publications such as Billboard, Adweek, and SRDS, VNU USA possesses a wide and deep stable of US information companies:

The VNU Precision Marketing Group consists of Claritas and National Decision Systems.
VNU Marketing Information Services includes Spectra, Sachs Group, Trade Dimensions/NRB, and Scarborough Research.
VNU Entertainment Information Group owns Broadcast Data Systems, the National Research Group, and Entertainment Marketing Information Services.
Finally, VNU's Media Information Group includes Competitive Media Reporting, Interactive Market Systems, Marketing Resources Plus, PERQ/HCI Research, Intermedia Advertising Solutions, and Adman/AMS.

In March of this year VNU announced a forthcoming "ambitious reorganization" of its US information services companies.

ESRI's MapObjects and SDE were indeed evaluated by Majors' team, but in the end they chose the Java/Oracle route instead. It seems likely that this technology developed for iMark will find its way into Claritas products as well.

Although designed for intranet and internet deployment, iMark can serve as a desktop product. iMark's design is also modular, feature-wise, so that specifically tailored versions can be developed for customers desiring advanced functionality such as site optimization or gravity models.

A Quick Look at iMark Express
iMark's interface is refreshingly clear and simple. Even the tool icons are oversized, as if to emphasize this simplicity. A house icon, for instance, is always available to take you back to "home view." One appreciates the success of Major's team in resisting feature creep. Everything here has a purpose.

It's important to understand that purpose. iMark is not desktop mapping software; it is a delivery vehicle for the core NDS corporate equity, their databases. It delivers these databases, and elicits report specs from a user, via a map-centric user interface. iMark Express' job is to carry that data to the user and to make the creation of reports straightforward. It hews to this purpose extremely well.

iMark contains a straightforward wizard for creating reports. The real power of the system is the wealth of NDS databases available for reporting. Once specified, the actual creation of reports is handled behind the scenes by Crystal Reports. Reports are preformatted with helpful icons; they can of course be customized. Here's a piece of the report specification wizard:

iMark Express Report Wizard

Report creation is iMark's principal task, and here the product shines. For instance, you can create a very deep variety of site-specific radii reports by:

activating the "radii report" button,
click a point on the map, and
selecting the report (from a very broad range of options) you want.

Literally, three or four mouse clicks. The result, in this case, is three separate one-page reports, one each for 1-, 3-, and 5-mail radii. Reports can be printed, of course, but they can also be exported in over 30 formats. Here, for instance, is the "executive summary" report of demographics around an Atlanta location, exported in HTML (this output has not been edited or formated by Directions Magazine).

Despite its simplicity, the functionality inside iMark is plenty robust for the task. (We drove the "standard" version; additional functionality is added at customer request.) The product ships with geocoding technology from Qualitative Marketing Software and with geographic data, to street level detail, from Geographic Data Technology.

Thematic mapping (color coding areas by some underlying variable) is straightforward. Here's a piece of that wizard: