Q. How long does it take to implement Kneebone?
A. Typical client installations are completed in less than 90 days!
Q. Do I need to install software and allocate hardware for Kneebone?
A. All SaaS products are built upon the Kneebone 3.0 platform hosted within a secure data center. Clients need only a browser to use a Kneebone application.
Q. Wouldn’t a general purpose B.I. Suite be better than Kneebone?
A. NO. Kneebone is custom built for marketing. Period. We collect the data, do the ETL and data cleansing, build the reports and dashboards and serve up your data. In short, Kneebone does everything. You don’t have to build data warehouses, design data catalogs, build models and serve up reporting services to your users.
Q. How secure is Kneebone? <more>
A. Kneebone products pass third party security assessments with AA certification surpassing common standards for most SaaS software. Testing includes the following (and much more):
- Network penetration and vulnerability testing
- SQL Injection
- CRLF Injection
- Credentials Management
- Cross-Site Scripting
- Cryptographic Issues
- Directory Traversal
Kneebone servers are hosted in our secure facility with 24/7 monitoring, redundant power and protected by dedicated firewalls to ensure both physical and application level data security. Kneebone data center backs up nightly with encrypted offsite rotating media. In our cloud based managed services, backups are in real time on multi-site SAN’s. A full I.T. infrastructure and application security brief is available upon request.
Q. Can I incorporate the data into our own data warehouses or B.I. processes?
A. Kneebone is a suite of SaaS Web Applications built upon the 3.0 platform. Using export features of the applications or using the exposed services of our API, you can get your data anytime in a format suitable for inclusion in data warehouses, analysis in desktop tools (Excel Pivots) or piping into B.I. tools.
Q. How much I.T. time and resources does Kneebone require from my company?
A. Our goal is to take on the resource burden. A typical implementation that takes 250-500 hours and will require 10% project management hours on the customer side. Only a fraction of these are IT. The balance is for strategy/user planning and socializing the technology. IT will direct and give permissions for data access. In some instances, raw data is delivered. Kneebone prefers unformatted queries and exports to custom reports.
Q. How does Kneebone access your data?
A. We work with you and your data as is. Most companies will be at the beginning, middle or end of a data project of some type. Kneebone can benefit from the many data projects as they are released but incomplete EDW or BI projects are not a barrier.
We have yet to find a company that has completed all of their data hurdles.
Where data is online, we can use your permissions to access it directly (web analytics, data base queries etc.). Where data resides with a third party, we can use your permission to work with their systems (media companies, Telco providers) etc.). And where data is in office desktop software… or boxes… we make it work.
Kneebone has the Cross-Marketing Data Pipeline to collect and perform ETL on virtually any type of data from spreadsheets and scanned PDF’s through to large pulls from Enterprise Data Warehouses.
No matter what its initial form, your data will end up cataloged and normalized into the Kneebone model.
Q. What types of data can Kneebone incorporate?
A. Any data useful to marketing will be considered. Kneebone will expand to include growing and changing data. The list below gives a good cross-section of data considered in Kneebone 3.0 to-date.
- AC Nielsen INF*ACT OLAP
- SAS
- AdTrak & DDS
- SAP
- Unica Affinium, Microsoft Dynamics
- Salesforce
- Sapient Bridge Track
- Google Analytics & Web Trends
- IBM DB2, SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL
- Microsoft Office (Access, Excel, CSV)
- Bell & TELUS Network reporting
Q. Why do you want non-sales related performance data?
A. Kneebone considers all Marketing Performance related data, not just sales data. Most businesses have touch points between marketing activities and a final sale. There are calls to call centers, visits to web sites, store visits, trade show visits, quotes, applications and much more. Full marketing performance measurement should follow the marketing dollar through all of these kinds of leads and responses.
Q. Shouldn’t I just build my own marketing performance model?
A. Today’s Marketers have increasingly complex data and aggressive new performance expectations…it’s difficult and expensive to build an all-inclusive solution. Marketers need quick and easy insight into what they have accomplished and they need a way to plan to see future performance.
Kneebone is purpose-built for capturing and modeling marketing data. It is not a bolt-on to a general purpose suite of B.I. tools. Kneebone has worked with Marketing and IT/Data teams across many verticals which has resulted in the very robust Kneebone 3.0 Platform that can deliver the information and functionality that Marketers need.
To function for performance management, Kneebone captures marketing data at the event level. Every single event is visible within our advanced dash boarding, modeling and visualization technologies. Kneebone provides a robust historical record of your marketing performance.
Kneebone has patented baseline generation algorithms. These are not statistical models but learned behaviors for all types of marketing performance. From the most granular event to a full annual plan, Kneebone produces a projected baseline against which to compare performance. This is a first for Marketing.
Kneebone is not a statistical analysis or consultative report. It is real-time ongoing software. You can easily generate aggregated statistical views of your marketing activities and performance. Hand them off to an internal group or to a third party consultant and by-pass the most expensive part of such analytics… collecting and normalizing the data!
Kneebone is vertical agnostic! If it costs money and drives performance, then we can handle it. We have successfully worked with companies in:
- Consumer Packaged Goods
- Food & Beverage Industry
- Technology & Telco
- Entertainment
- Resort &Tourism
- Retail
- Financial Industry
- B2B