Rainier,
Hey, that gets us back to the final Gorilla Game case study in the text, where Clarify and Vantive show up as gorilla candidates in the customer service applications field.
True, but since the book was published a lot has happened. Scopus, which along with Clarify and Vantive was one of the top three leaders in the customer service market, was acquired by Siebel. That acquisition made Siebel a more complete front office provider, being by far the leading sales force automation provider and one of the leading customer service providers after its acquisition of Scopus.
In the mean time, Vantive decided it wanted to be more well rounded, deciding to compete in Siebel's market. But it didn't work out. The company is now supposedly refocused on its core competency, but we'll have to see how effective the new management team is now that founding CEO Luongo is gone.
Clarify, in the mean time, appears to be fully recovered from its disastrous acquisition a few years ago. But it is showing signs of great performance with pint-sized revenue compared to Siebel's.
That leads me to your other comment: it looks like Clarify has taken the lead in the Customer Service gorilla game. Because Siebel doesn't break out its sources of revenue, we don't know that Clarify is the leader. Actually, I doubt that it is. To put the two companies' revenue into perspective, Siebel had more revenue in the first quarter than Clarify had in the last three quarters combined.
--Mike Buckley |
