In addition to selling companies software for analyzing their marketing data, SAP SA will now also provide the information itself through a new cloud offering that was revealed at its annual user conference today. Digital Consumer Insight is not a software-as-a-service solution in the traditional sense, however: It’s integrated into the vendor’s web store and is priced according to the amount of records bought rather than on a subscription basis.

The information is provided in the form of $439 “data files” that contain an unspecified amount of details about a buyer segment of the user’s choice. SAP says that organizations can learn the demographic makeup of their customers, including their gender and age, as well as more granular metrics like the devices they’re using to shop online. Digital Consumer Insight then makes it possible to compare these statistics against competitors’ data to see whether they’re doing a better job at targeting key audiences.

And SAP sees its new service coming handy in numerous other applications, too. Companies could use the information to adjust sales efforts,  identify expansion locations and find ways to optimize advertising campaigns. Such analysis can be performed using one of the German software giant’s numerous business intelligence offerings, or in the Consumer Insight 365 mobile app that it’s rolling out to complement the data files.

Being able to purchase the information from SAP’s web-store with a few clicks is much more convenient for users of its products than turning to an outside data vendor. However, the service may struggle to win over new customers from rivals like Oracle Corp., which offers its own customer tracking service. The vendor has spent over a billion dollars over the past two years to create one of the biggest and most detailed information troves of its kind on the market

Nonetheless, the new service should make SAP much more competitive in the marketing automation world than it was before. In a time when practically every aspect of organizations’ engagement efforts relies on audience data, a supply of quality information can provide a major boost for an analytics vendor’s value proposition.

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