Briefs

CHICAGO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Aug. 8, 2001

Sofmap Inc., a leading Japanese computer retailer, tripled the profits
generated by its Web site using Clementine data mining software from
SPSS BI, a division of SPSS Inc. (Nasdaq: SPSS).

Sofmap applied the data mining technology to develop a recommendation
engine that suggests products to visitors to the site. Since the new
engine went live in November 2000, visitors to the site stay twice as
long on average and the rate of sales growth has increased 18 percent
without additional marketing expenditures, resulting in substantial
profitability gains.

"We already had a large database with information on over two million
customers," said Nobuyuki Matsuda, strategic planning manager for
Sofmap. "We needed a data mining tool to analyze the demographics,
individual characteristics and purchase patterns of these customers in
order to provide visitors with recommendations to help them make wise
purchases. We selected Clementine because it is so easy to use that it
enable the marketing staff members who have the best understanding of
customer behavior to perform the analysis and develop the business
rules for the recommendation engine on their own. Immediately after it
went live, we began to see substantial increases in both traffic and
sales."

During the recommendation engine's first month, site traffic increased
from a typical 18 million page views per month to a new sustained
level of about 35 million views per month. Matsuda said the rise in
traffic could be almost entirely attributed to the new recommendation
engine. Prior to the go-live date, sales from Sofmap.com were running
at a rate of about over 200 percent higher than the same month in the
previous year. When the revised site went live, the growth rate
immediately jumped to 320 percent.

For more information, visit www.spss.com.