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Exploring Affinium Campaign Interact 7.5 Concepts - Part 1

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Oct 13 2009

Part1: Goodbye multiple copies of flowcharts!

For my next few entries, I plan to take a high level approach to discussing and comparing the new features of Affinium Campaign Interact 7.5 and how they improve upon some of the pain points of previous releases. Along the way, I intend to bring some insight into the migration process highlighting any "gotchas" for anyone familiar with the 6.x platform and thinking about making the leap to the next major release.

I've been working with Interact for the last 3 years now and the majority of that time has been spent on the Campaign Interact 6.4 decisioning platform. However, earlier this year, the client I've been working with since 2006 made the decision to migrate from 6.4 to Interact 7.5 and I was happy to get right to work on a proof-of-concept (POC).

Now, with the POC behind us and deemed a complete success, it's full steam ahead with the production implementation. There is definitely an adoption hurdle to overcome from an architecture standpoint because the application has been completely re-architected from top to bottom and requires new hardware and datasource configuration, but the benefits outweigh the difficulties of a more complex system installation.

One of the most obvious improvements is the tremendously increased throughput attributed to java serialization and multi-threading capabilities of Campaign Interact 7.5 coupled with configurable database connection pooling. The Interact system administrator has complete control over how many threads should be spawned and can set limits or increase the number based on performance feedback and usage statistics. I think that for anyone that has experience in developing interactive campaigns in Interact 6.4 knows the pain of having to create and maintain multiple copies of highly utilized flowcharts to account for the single-threaded nature of the flowchart engine. With version 6.4 it was a simple rule, one flowchart handled one request and when that request was completed, the flowchart dipped back into the queue table to get the next one in line. With this approach, it was only a matter of time before a highly trafficked page created a logjam in the queue. Thanks to the dynamic threading capabilities of Campaign Interact 7.5, the number of requests being handled at a given time is simply a limit of how many active threads your hardware is able to support.

We all know that in the real-world, your interactive messaging strategy changes often (probably month-to-month at the very least). When we look back at having to maintain multiple copies of a flowchart, it becomes easy to see the frustration with swapping out even a single offer. Open flowchart copy X, double-click Recommend process, change offer, save flowchart, repeat. In Campaign Interact 7.5 not only do we maintain a single copy of a flowchart, but offer assignment has been decoupled from the flowchart itself and placed under the ownership of the new Interaction Strategy Manager. The fundamental changes to the flowcharts and offer assignment via the Strategy Manager will be just one of a number of topics covered in upcoming blogs.

Future topics (in no particular order) include:
- Fundamental changes in flowcharts and introduction of Strategy Manager
- Goodbye queue tables, hello Profile table
- Usage of the Blacklist functionality for offer suppression
- Managed deployment to downstream environments (finally!)

With Campaign Interact 7.5, we can see that real-time inbound marketing is no longer an afterthought, but front-and-center in the business world. The majority of folks in the campaign management arena would probably admit that the core Affnium Campaign product is an industry leader in the marketing automation category. However, in my opinion, Campaign Interact 6.4 always felt like an add-on module that was created to work in the world of batch campaigns making lots of dips to the DB and being generally a tad clunky. But, Campaign Interact 7.5 is clearly engineered to be a full-blooded application unto itself which plays very nicely with its offline batch counterpart, Affinium Campaign, marrying the online and offline marketing strategies all in a single place.

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