Sagent names exec to head data mining

Software company Sagent announced Monday the appointment of Chris Hamlin as vice president and general manager of data mining and data quality. Hamlin comes to Mountain View, Calif.-based Sagent from SPSS, where he led the Chicago-based software company's global strategic partnering efforts. Sagent's new hire comes amid growing competition to refine corporate data--an emerging technology niche that some say could revolutionize e-commerce. A number of start-ups are angling to streamline and simplify conflicting, duplicated and otherwise botched files--an unseemly plague known as "dirty data." After the data gets cleaned up, other companies use statistical analysis to uncover hidden patterns in seemingly random information--a process known as "data mining."