signed to prevent any loss of transactions during the failure period. This benefit has considerable application to Web-based commerce and application service providers and gives Oracle significant competitive advantage in this area ("US: E-Commerce Safety," 2000, p. 2).
In mid-1999, Informix launched i.Sell, an electronic store front package. The package features a shopping cart, payment processing and order fulfillment, features which the Web has come to expect from electronic store front products. The company announced at this time that it was planning to incorporate data warehousing technology (acquired when it purchased the company Red Brick) with its e-commerce software to offer Web companies a way to track and predict customer behavior. This takes customer profiling one step farther than mere customer profiling, which details what types of customers are visiting which sites and what type of purchases they are making. By using technology to predict what consumers are likely to purchase in the future, Web companies are abl
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