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As part of Vindicia’s expanding partnership with IBM, we attended the IBM Smarter Commerce Global Summit (IBMSCGS) in Orlando last week.

It was an outstanding conference that showcased IBM’s position as the global leader in end-to-end marketing solutions, bringing “science to the art of marketing”.

The theme of this year’s conference was the “Chief Executive Customer”. The phrase communicates exactly how you should view your customers. You must view them as members of the board who are instrumental in every important decision. In short, treat them as if they call the shots. If you don’t, then someone else will, and your customer will not be your customer anymore.

IBM’s Smarter Commerce initiative and Enterprise Marketing Management (EMM) service allow companies to create flexible, interactive and personalized marketing campaigns that are targeted towards their Chief Executive Customers. Vindicia has a partnership with WebSphere Smarter Commerce (watch the video describing this exciting partnership), and integrations with CoreMetrics, Cast Iron and Cognos from the IBM portfolio. As the head of Product Management at Vindicia, I went to IBMSCGS to learn more about the other Smarter Commerce and EMM products and consider their capabilities. Now my head is buzzing with possibilities!

At Vindicia, we believe that your billing engine is a powerful marketing tool. This means CashBox is not just your billing platform, but rather a key piece of your customer acquisition and retention strategy. It also means that future CashBox features will focus on Marketing and Selling Automation – tools that allow for A/B testing, subscription worthiness scoring, smart offering capabilities and much more.

Optimized marketing can only be accomplished when you have a critical mass of data and the tools to analyze that data to know what really works. To put the possibilities into perspective, CashBox has over 120 million accounts, 80 million securely stored credit cards and $4 billion in transactions processed. This is an enormous amount of the most critical data for a business; it tells you who actually paid, how much they paid, and how long they paid for. After all, in recurring or subscription-based business models, real billing data is the most important indication of the value of your customers.

With this data, we are now poised to have IBM’s Smarter Commerce and EMM application services enable CashBox to provide the unparalleled next generation of Marketing and Selling automation capabilities. This is designed to provide the greatest value for the relationship between you and your Chief Executive Customer.

IBMSCGS was an incredible forum to flush out the strides we will make in this direction. I look forward to continued updates about our advances towards this goal. Learn more about our partnership with IBM WebSphere Smarter Commerce. Learn about CashBox DataBridge, Vindicia’s out-of-the-box integration to 160+ enterprise systems leveraging IBM Cast Iron. And come back often to learn more about Vindicia CashBox Insight and the upcoming business intelligence offerings leveraging IBM Cognos.