CASE STUDY

Direct marketing supplier AZ Direct relies on ® and Transaction Software's data- base expertise

AZ Direct is one of Europe's leading direct marketing companies. AZ Direct offers innovative products and services relating to addresses, information, and information processing. Over almost four decades, the company has grown from a traditional direct marketing company to a universal information pro- vider for marketing. Many companies and agencies have used the ideas and solutions offered by AZ Direct to initiate a successful dialogue with their cus- tomers. AZ Direct is a subsidiary of arvato AG, the internationally networked media service provider of Bertelsmann AG. Bertelsmann AG has 42,000 employees worldwide. For further information, please visit: www.az-direct.de

ConData arvato services is a division of AZ Direct. ConData maintains close relationships with top suppliers throughout the direct marketing value chain. For further information, please visit: www.arvato-condata.de

Overview The ConTo application

Industry: ConTo is a new concept in direct marketing. For the first time, this application Direct marketing combines one of the strongest and best-known consumer in Information service Germany with a powerful tool on one program DVD and two data DVDs. Clients receive a comprehensive and constantly updated embedded Application: in the user-friendly ConTo program. The ConTo application is provided free of ConTo charge. With ConTo, users can easily work with a number of different feature combinations to assemble selections that are specifically customized for end Product: clients, or to optimize consumer address records by comparing them against Transbase® CD reference records.

Benefits: "Versatile and yet simple, easy to use, and fast." This is how Jörg Probst, Enhancement of Managing Director of ConData arvato services describes the outstanding fea- customer data bases tures of ConTo. Flexibility Rapid analysis and The application offers a complete range of options for enhancing customer selection databases and creating customized selections. Users can create their own

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selections with just a few mouse clicks. Within seconds, the tool supplies the required addresses in a file format. ConTo uses the familiar Windows look- and-feel, which means that users can learn to use the program quickly. The program offers an almost unlimited number of ways to combine the various parameters.

ConData offers its services primarily to list brokers, systems companies, and direct marketers. With the ConTo application, ConData provides users with mobile access to statistical data regarding personal, household, and street information. A wide selection of parameters, such as age, consumer prefe- rences, residential location, region, and many others, can be combined, depending upon the end-client's requirements.

Application with high-end database system

AZ Direct, responsible for developing the ConTo application, uses Transbase®as the database system. Transbase® is a particularly powerful rela- tional SQL database system. Transbase® is suitable for use in servers or as an integrated database system. Transbase® is the core product of Transaction Software and is the focus of the Transbase® solution. Transbase® can be enhanced with the powerful add-on modules Transbase® Fulltext, Transbase® CD, Transbase® Hypercube, and Transbase® D. AZ Direct uses the Transbase® CD module. This module is specially designed for the ConTo application distri- buted on DVD. Transbase® CD runs in the background of the application as an SQL engine and/or high-end database system. Transbase® is a full-function database system with unrestricted SQL. Transbase® CD makes it possible to run the application directly on CD/DVD-ROM. CD/DVD ROMs are frequently used only as distribution media. Transbase® CD can turn these media directly into data storage units.

Database technology specially designed for CD/DVD applications

Due to intelligent shadow mechanisms and sophisticated multi-level-cache implementation update or delete operations on ROM databases can be done transparently via SQL. Performance differs only slightly from that of hard drive-based databases. Binary-compatible data storage lets users exchange CDs and DVDs between computers with different architectures. An entire array of tools offers special support for generating compressed and encrypted CD/DVD-ROM databases. One special feature of Transbase® is access protection. Files are stored with encryption. Communication is also encrypted to protect the database contents, such as addresses, against unauthorized access at all times.

Transbase® is well-known for its outstanding performance. Specially optimi- zed prefix B+ trees form the basic data structure for Transbase®. These are used for clustered primary indexing and for secondary indexing. This makes Transbase® particularly suitable for large datasets.

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Database expertise

Since the decision was made to use Transbase®, Transaction Software has also become AZ Direct's partner for database expertise. In this relationship, Transaction Software supports AZ Direct's development of new applications with its database knowledge and skilled developer support.

Transbase® - the SQL engine

Thanks to the outstanding performance of Transbase®, the ConTo application can perform extremely rapid analyses. In extensive benchmarking tests on various traditional database systems, Transbase® showed the best overall per- formance. Even the massive increases in data volume expected in the future should not overstretch the capabilities of the ConTo program and Transbase®.

"Our close collaboration with Transaction gives us the opportunity to incorpo- rate our requests and ideas into the development process of the Transbase® database in real-time. In the future, our focus will be on making the best pos- sible use of the potential offered by Transbase® to meet our objectives, " says Björn Wessel, Director of IT Content Development for AZ Direct in Gütersloh.

The Transbase® relational database system is used extensively as a strategic platform in the automotive industry, including the all-important aftermarket, automobile information systems, spare parts catalogs, and repair shop infor- mation systems for many makes and models, as well as large parts of the auto- motive supplier industry.

Project background for the ConTo application

AZ Direct's development objective was to create a portable application that does not require the user to have comprehensive knowledge of database administration. Another goal was to achieve application performance compa- rable to applications based on large server databases. The company was also aiming for a secure database that could provide the maximum possible pro- tection against abuse of the data being used by ConData and its partners. To meet these demanding standards, the company needed to find an innovative and responsive partner. "We completed our search with the conclusion that Transbase® was the right solution for us, and Transaction Software was the right partner for our database projects," says Björn Wessel.

Compact, fast, and available anywhere

One new feature is mobile use of the ConTo, which is possible thanks to Transbase®. The ConTo application now provides address information on three DVDs with an easy-to-use interface and extremely rapid analytical capa- bility.

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These DVDs include:

30 million private households with statistical data about age, gender, title/salutation, etc.; number of persons per household, socio-demographic features such as buying power, mail-order buying tendencies, areas of consumer preference such as cosmetics, clothing/fashion, home/ house/garden, and regional characteristics, including subdistricts, munici- palities, etc., information on 20 million buildings, including building structure, resi- dential location, and number of households per building, as well as com- Das ConData Team prehensive street information, all valid postal codes, all valid destinations, more than 74,000 subdistricts country-wide, and number of buildings per street block.

Competitive advantages for customers and users

With ConTo, ConData's clients can now select addresses directly, based upon their own specific needs. No other customer database offers such a fast and easy way to learn more about consumers.

Contact

Transaction Software GmbH Willy-Brandt-Allee 2 81829 München

Tel.: +49 89 / 627 09 - 0 Fax: +49 89 / 627 09 - 11 [email protected] www.transaction.de www.transbase.de

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