• by Gavin O'Malley  @mp_gavin, October 19, 2009

Behavioral analytics provider Quantivo on Monday debuted a service designed to help marketers -- along with Web and business analysts -- more effectively segment and target customers based on a complete and expanded view of their behaviors.

Quantivo Enrich attempts to give clients a more comprehensive view of customer behaviors by connecting multichannel actions, and by closing gaps in -- and adding important business metrics to -- their original data.

Brian Kelly, CEO of Quantivo, said the advent of a real-time and increasingly complex Web landscape makes such a service necessary. "Customers live in a fast-paced, multichannel world and interact with companies in many different ways," he said.

"Each customer interaction provides valuable insights, but only by combining these behaviors with enriched business data can marketers and business analysts make decisions based on complete views of customer interactions," Kelly added.

Quantivo Enrich is a cloud-based service, which Kelly claims can process billions of customer interactions and data points. Its data integration platform combines one-to-one, one-to-many and many-to-many relationships, allowing for vertical or time-based connections as well as horizontal or look-up data connections.

Quantivo Enrich connects customer behaviors that occur vertically over time, during separate transactions or across multiple interactions, such as purchases or Web sessions.

Despite security concerns, cloud computing has become more popular in a variety of industries, including advertising, marketing and education.

In July, the San Mateo, Calif.-based Quantivo released a behavioral analytics service hosted on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, Amazon EC2, which the company says increases or decreases a client's computing capacity within minutes.

A recent Forrester report credited the downturn in the economy for raising interest in cloud computing, which is known to improve operational efficiencies by reducing a company's required time and resources.

The report, "How Secure Is Your Cloud?" also acknowledged cloud computing's security issues -- and, in particular, the case of Google doc users inadvertently sharing content with a wider audience than they intended.