Insurance.com is to insurance as LendingTree.com is to mortgages and Moving.com is to moving companies. Visitors to its Web site fill out a form detailing their insurance needs and upload it to the system, which promptly sends the information to potential insurers. Those companies then compete by sending their best rate offers to the potential customer.

Launched in 2001 in Solon, Ohio, Insurance.com sells about 12,000 insurance policies per month, said Joe Singleton, director of IT for the online insurance marketplace. Much of that is due to the fact that it can pass along rate quotes and other responses from insurers -- who communicate with Insurance.com via XML or its proprietary data format -- within 45 seconds.

Insurance.com wanted to start using the sort of real-time business intelligence (BI) that other retail sites use. For example, if someone buys a book on Amazon.com, the online retailer's site will immediately suggest additional options based on that purchase.

When consumers fill out the form at Insurance.com's site, the data is compiled into a single XML Clob, or Character Large Object, and sent to a staging environment -- where it awaits an hourly upload into the SQL Server 2000-based data warehouse, Singleton said. But with recently purchased CRM software from Chordiant Software Inc., Insurance.com hopes to be able to send targeted banner ads during the 15 to 30 minutes users are on the site entering data.

Microsoft's Data Transformation Services, part of SQL Server 2000, wasn't up to the task, which is what prompted Singleton to look to San Francisco-based Informatica's PowerCenter. After fully refining the system, he expects to shorten the data mining process to seconds.