Apatar announced the release of its new StrikeIron US Address Verification connector for the Apatar Open Source Data Integration toolset. Using StrikeIron’s US Address Verification Web service, the new feature relies on United States Postal Service-certified technology to verify, correct, and enhance any address in the United States with live data. It cleans customer data before it gets into CRM/ERP systems, databases, flat files, and RSS feeds by correcting extracted addresses, adding ZIP+4 data, specifying congressional districts, carrier routes, etc.

Improving customer data quality without coding
According to Aberdeen Group, 52 percent of organizations consider the “verification of data accuracy or completeness” to be one of the biggest customer data management challenges. Apatar released open source tools for non-technical staff and customers to access the application data they need to make their work efforts more efficient. With Apatar’s visual toolset, your average users can perform even complex data integration without having to write a single line of a code. The new data quality connector was created as a result of a partnership agreement with StrikeIron signed in November 2007.

The StrikeIron US Address Verification connector inspects each address to ensure its validity and, using sophisticated matching and data synchronization technology, updates incorrect addresses according to the postal standards. On top of that, it inspects house numbers, street directions, street names, street types, apartment numbers, and P.O. boxes to ensure the accuracy of each value. StrikeIron’s Web service processes and returns a valid quality dataset with all possible mistakes (misspellings, wrong street type extensions, city and state names) eliminated. Using StrikeIron’s US Address Verification Web service, Apatar allows users to increase productivity, improve sales strategies, and take customer service to a new level by providing faster transaction processing and higher accuracy. This solution can be used to verify both a single address and a large set of addresses in batch mode.

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“Quality data is the life blood of all business processes,” said Renat Khasanshyn, CEO and founder of Apatar. “Every organization depends on reliable customer information. But, too often the quality of data doesn’t keep pace with the development of business processes and doesn’t live up to corporate requirements for effective, reliable, and controlled data. The StrikeIron US Address Verification connector can assist you in the process, creating a competitive working environment.”

“US Address Verification Web service reduces the time wasted on checking and correcting wrong addresses before your managers get to work with them,” said Bob Brauer, CEO and President of StrikeIron. “Delivered directly into visual Apatar’s interface, StrikeIron’s verification Web service enables users to easily integrate customer data into corporate CRM/ERP applications, Web sites, databases, files, and interactive services without any coding. It updates customer information, performing adequate data enrichment, and makes your data relevant and easy to work with.”

Apatar Open Source Data Integration features and benefits:

• Improve data quality
• Reduce integration and maintenance costs, shorten implementation time
• No coding
• The ability to create, publish, share, and re-use data transformations and output to RSS feeds by monitoring keywords and URLs for both internal and external systems
• Connectivity to Oracle, MS SQL, MySQL, Sybase, Microsoft Access, PostgreSQL, InstantDB, BorlandJDataStore, Csv, Qed, HSQL, Compiere ERP, SalesForce.Com, SugarCRM, GoldMine, Microsoft Excel, XML, RSS, ATOM, FTP, POP3, LDAP, WebDav, Autodesk Buzzsaw, any JDBC data sources, Amazon S3, and Flickr
• Job scheduler and synchronization
• Platform-independent, runs from Windows, Linux; 100% Java- based

StrikeIron US Address Verification features and benefits:

• Applicable with a single address or as a batch process
• Validates and corrects addresses and adds ZIP+4 data
• Appends carrier routes
• Standardizes city and state names
• Gives location latitude and longitude
• Provides means to validate any shipment’s address before it is sent to avoid costly returns and late delivery

For more information on Apatar, contact Alexander Pipko alex.p@apatar.com at Apatar.