Decentrix Offers Big Brother in a Box

For example, in the implementation we've been doing with one large station group, they have their own in-house systems. They've got their own tech team and built all their own traffic systems, so they have the knowledge to fairly rapidly map to our definitions.

So your system extracts and organizes data from their system?

Correct. It takes the data it comes across and goes through a process in the data warehouse called ETL -- for extract, transform and load. That process essentially pulls up the data. The best way to think about it is that it cleanses the data and puts it into a form that allows you to readily report.

Here's an example of why that's necessary: Say you've got a very large group, perhaps 30 TV stations, and, at every one of those, people may have entered an advertiser slightly differently. We might find different descriptions at each station.

When you move everything into a data warehouse, you need to have the same description, not a dozen different descriptions floating around in the analysis. The ETL process does that cleanup. It maps all those disparate elements into a single description that allows you to view the data in a sensible way.

You say that speed and instant access are important components of the system.

Yes, and you also want to know that the information is up to date, and that you can get to it in seconds. You don't have to call someone to have a report run. You don't have to wait for hours or days.

But it can only be as current as when it was last updated.

Yes, and in large measure it depends on the system that's the source for the information. If it's a traffic system where data is only updated each night, then it would be as recent as the night before.

But if it's a traffic system with the ability to provide a constant feed of data so that every change is fed in at real time, then the system can be [fully up to date] and the CEO can look at the dashboard and watch it change second by second.

How does such instant information benefit the CEO? I assume, for example, he can take quick action if a station is underperforming.

Correct. What you do normally with these systems is provide the ability to set up what are called KPIs, or key performance indicators. Essentially, they provide analysis of the health of the business.

Are KPIs based on targets?

On targets, objectives and forecasts. They may be targets that are comparatives. For example, you might want to be looking at an objective to increase revenue 10 percent above the same time last year.

Those objectives can be fed into the system to create KPIs. A CEO can look at his dashboard and determine, for example, that target revenue performance is on a downward trend, say, 5 percent off from where it should be.

What he can then do is quickly drill down on that and explode out the information so he can look at all of the stations. He can identify the station that's causing the poor performance. He can drill down further and identify the salespeople that are underperforming.

Or maybe it's an advertiser that is off the mark. You have the ability to drill down in a matter of seconds and determine the nature of the problem. Rather than have to ask other people, you can immediately go directly to the individuals concerned to get the matter addressed.

It sounds like a very sophisticated monitoring tool.

It is indeed. It's intended to give the heartbeat of the business, and to always be readily available. It is a monitoring tool that everybody can use, and as such nobody gets surprised about what's going on. There should be no reason why a salesperson doesn't know they're underperforming -- or exceeding their budget.

Does it replace existing systems?

It doesn't replace anything. It is a brand new opportunity, a tool that media operators have never had access to before. The transactional systems they have -- the traffic systems, the program management systems -- were never really designed to provide this kind of forecasting and analysis.

Transactional systems tend to be very bad when it comes to trying to report in a timely way the kinds of things that management needs, and sometimes they take hours or days to produce. Often by the time you have the data, it's stale and irrelevant.

What's your competition?

Many businesses are starting to work in the business intelligence area. Very large companies like IBM provide tools to build business intelligence solutions, but we're the only company providing an out-of-the-box solution that tracks the whole process for the media industries.

What media other than broadcasting do you serve?