iMercury is a web-based consumer panel data analysis system, designed for consumer panel service providers and their customers. iMercury provides users with new insights into consumer purchase behaviour and shopping patterns of selected demographic segments across retail outlet types and competitive brands, varying over the time.

In addition to respondent-level purchase case data, including date, full product description, weight or volume of package, price and place of purchase, iMercury uses the standard demographic attributes of the panel members, plus market specific information including product groups, product and brand hierarchy, retail outlet information and measurement systems. The database that iMercury works with has an open and documented format and can be populated either with a built-in data loading tool or a user-defined procedure. iMercury provides a database integrity validation tool, ensuring reliable system operation after data updates.

iMercury delivers to consumer panel service customers valuable information about category and brand penetration, brand loyalty and switching, place of purchase preference, heavy buyer significance and structure, frequency of purchase, purchase volume and expenditure by category and brand, brand share, average expenditure and volume per purchase, etc, etc.

iMercury provides the following types of analysis report:

	Market Report: a general purpose analysis tool, allowing you to perform flexible multidimensional tabulation, using a set of predefined variables and statistics as well as user-defined breakdowns; you may use the ranking, suppression and masking functionality in addition to being able to pivot the resulting table;

			Brand Loyalty: showing the demographic profile of buyers loyal to a particular brand;

	Brand Intersection: showing how many buyers of a selected brand are also buying competitive brands;

	Buyer Groups,: showing the segmentation of buyers into demographic groups depending on selected purchasing weight (heavy, medium, light);

	Repertoire Groups: showing segmentation of buyers into demographic groups depending on the number of brands purchased;

	Brand Switching: showing buyer migration between selected brands across time.

	Change Analysis: showing the structure and significance of possible sources of change to consumption behaviour;

Correspondence Analysis: delivering a graphical view of the relationships between different parameters in two-dimensional space.

The key features of iMercury are:

For service providers		For service customers
Support for licensing and controlling the numbers of and types of service features and data available to a corporate or individual customer; Advanced user management, including association of data filters, permissions and privileges to corporate accounts, individual users and their groups; Full scalability allowing you to increase the capacity of the server farm from just one to any number of servers, in response to the performance requirements of the customers; System performance management, including customisable load balancing and user behaviour analysis. Support for transparent data updates via switching between consumer panel databases “on-the-fly” without stopping the service; Support for Unicode in consumer panel data, enabling texts in any language.		Personal workspace with advanced report management functionality, similar to file/folder management; Version control features allowing you to manage the history of report modifications and revert back if necessary; Support for storing personal data on the service provider’s server as well as downloading to/uploading from the local computer in XML format; Fully asynchronous server-side calculations. Work can continue while a report is being processed. The end-user computer’s performance is not affected; Seamless exports to the Microsoft Office suite of programs.

The main advantages of iMercury as a web service are:

For service providers		For service customers
Reduced data distribution costs, through keeping and updating a single copy of data either in-house or at Application Service Provider (ASP) site; Reduced software maintenance costs, due to having no special client-side software and keeping a single installation of iMercury either in-house or at ASP site; Reduced support costs, through fewer IT problems at the client site; Increased data security and integrity, through raw data encapsulation and no requirement to distribute it. Overall an enhanced quality of service, through concentration on the business itself, rather than supporting IT infrastructure; New marketing opportunities, through no-extracost personalisation and customisation of the service.		Minimised set-up costs, just a computer with Internet access and browser is necessary; Reduced IT operational costs, through not keeping data and specialised software inhouse; Reduced training costs, through simple and friendly web interface, and support for predefined templates; Better use of existing hardware, through performing resource-hungry operations at service provider’s servers; Increased productivity, through sharing common corporate data at service provider’s site; Increased work force mobility, through accessing the service from virtually anywhere at any time.

The System Requirements for iMercury are:

For service providers		For service customers
10 end-user configuration * 512 Kbit/s Internet Connection; Web Server: Pentium 3, 1GHz, RAM 1Gb, Windows 2000 Server, Microsoft IIS 5.0; DB Server: Pentium 3, 1GHz, RAM 1Gb, Windows 2000 Server, Microsoft SQL Server 7 or 2000; Calculation Server: Pentium 3, 1GHz, RAM 1Gb, Windows 2000 Server. 100 end-users configuration * 2 Mbit/s Internet Connection; Web Server: Pentium 4, 3GHz, RAM 2Gb, Windows 2000 Server, Microsoft IIS 5.0; DB Server: Pentium 4, 3GHz, RAM 2Gb, Microsoft SQL Server 7 or 2000; Three Calculation Servers: Pentium 4, 3GHz, RAM 2Gb, Windows 2000 Server, each. * Figures presented assume database, containing information about 500000 purchase facts and 1000 respondents. Production configuration may vary depending on the database size and performance requirements.		PC with permanent connection to the Internet Microsoft Windows 98 or higher Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.5 or higher, 6.0 recommended CPU Intel Celeron 400 MHz or higher RAM 128 Mb or higher