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Q. Which criteria should someone selecting a vendor of personalisation technol-

ogy consider?

Clearly this will involve the factors affecting the return on investment and cost of own-

ership on one side and functional issues on the other.

Magiq aims to provide  top-  notch ROI by reducing deployment costs (via the  tag- 

 free deployment) and minimising operating costs by using the latest  cloud-  computing 

technology and by allowing users complete control over their expenditure with a simple 

traffic-banded rate. At the same time it is attempting to provide maximum return by pro-

viding usable/actionable data on the individual users and their interests, and by allowing 

one-to-one real-time personalisation (as opposed to the suck-it- and-  see approaches 

provided by MVT tools and ‘ herd-  behaviour’ approaches of product recommendation 

solutions).

From a functional perspective, each business needs to understand the functions 

it wants to implement to maximise the effectiveness of its online marketing and com-

munications. This will vary from business to business. Magiq’s range of simple-to-use 

apps attempts to provide powerful personalisation, optimisation and CRM solutions on 

normal PC and mobile platforms. Other solutions focus on features like product recom-

mendations and simple AB testing which are functions not provided by Magiq today.

Also, the roadmap of a supplier is important as investment in solutions in this area 

tends to be quite  long-  term (especially as the value and quality of customer data avail-

able grow). So it is important to choose suppliers with  long-  term commitment to the 

market, and a vision for the future.

So, for example, Magiq provides a good platform based on individual customer 

data, and we plan to extend the family of apps to embrace other applications like email 

campaigns, dynamic pricing,  cross-  channel data integration etc., and also extend it to 

embrace Flash, Flex and  stand-  alone apps created with Adobe AIR.