PeopleSoft Releases CRM 8.8
Erika Morphy, www.CRMDaily.com
PeopleSoft (Nasdaq: PSFT - news) has released a new version of its groundbreaking CRM application. PeopleSoft CRM 8.8, available this month, includes upgrades of more than 150 new features and enhancements to its sales, marketing and service suite applications. The new app also adds three new verticals -- high tech, energy and insurance -- as it attempts to best Siebel's (Nasdaq: SEBL - news) dominance in the vertical space.
"This is a little more newsworthy than what you would consider a point release," Steven Bonadio, senior program director for META Group told CRMDaily.com. "There are a lot of things coming together in this release, such as their acquisitions in marketing and product configuration. They also did a good job with the usability issues in 8, which I used to describe as 'spartan.' They have taken steps to make sure the user interface is more interactive and graphical."
Version 8.8 is better integrated than its predecessor, he added.
Smooth Transition
PeopleSoft entered the CRM market through its acquisition of Vantive. Unlike the experience of many companies, though, the integration and application rewriting following the deal went remarkably well. At the same time, the ERP (enterprise resource planning) vendor has continued to invest in its CRM application, according to Brad Wilson, PeopleSoft vice president of marketing -- "in the platform, in the overall architecture of the underlying application suite, in the actual CRM applications and in the people."
Specifically, PeopleSoft is concentrating its efforts on developing smarter business processes, ease of use and faster implementation, said Joe Davis, vice president and general manager of PeopleSoft CRM.
"We did a ton of usability testing and completely rewrote the user interface," he told CRMDaily. "It looks better and, more importantly, is much more streamlined in terms of number of screens the user sifts through and the number of clicks someone has make to perform a basic function."
New Features
According to the company, new features in PeopleSoft 8.8 include:
* personalized dialogs, improved management of multichannel and multiwave campaigns, and advanced customer profile management for audience segmentation in its marketing application;
* product-advisor and enterprise-pricer features to drive guided selling, and more flexible forecasting and territory management enhancements in its sales application;
* a new HR (human resources) help desk application that puts agents and specialists "one click away" from transactions in their HR management systems, allowing them to log and resolve cases for the workforce; and
* improved agent navigation, quick code field prepopulation, and new browser-based push capabilities that drive events to users in real-time without requiring code on the client in the service application.
PeopleSoft 8.8 also includes 20 new prebuilt integration points. "Every customer faces the challenge of trying to integrate into other systems," Davis said. "We added more preintegration to our own other applications, such as HR and supply chain and financials, but also provided connectors that you can integrate into other vendors' products, such as SAP. We've put those into the box so [our customers] don’t have to do it."
Frontiers To Explore
PeopleSoft 8.8 does have room for improvement though, Bonadio said. "They need to build out their collaborative CRM infrastructure. That is really where their biggest product gap is today."
Version 8.8 includes an initial multichannel product, he acknowledged. "But their challenge is to tighten those capabilities across telephony [through] their partnerships. That is the next frontier they have to explore."
Building Out Verticals
PeopleSoft also gained more ground in the vertical CRM wars. PeopleSoft added three verticals -- energy, high tech and insurance -- to its portfolio of financial services, communications and government CRM industry-specific applications.
There is no doubt that Siebel excels in this space, according to Bonadio -- in fact, all analysts agree on that. However, in the tier-one space, "PeopleSoft has made the most progress on the vertical front," he said. "We don't see much coming from Oracle (Nasdaq: ORCL - news) yet, or E.piphany."
SAP (NYSE: SAP - news), while heavily verticalized in its ERP applications, has not made much progress on the CRM side. "I think they recognize that the core emphasis has to be on extending verticalization to their CRM suite. I anticipate we will see SAP doing that within the next year to 18 months."
Late to the Game
PeopleSoft was a relative latecomer to the CRM arena, and its earlier incarnations of the app were not well received, to say the least. However, version 8 broke new ground for the vendor and -- based on its claims of being the first to offer a pure Internet-accessible architecture -- for the industry itself.
Davis credits Peoplesoft CEO Craig Conway with the decision to go in this direction. "A lot of people -- including myself when I was at Clarify -– we were talking about how there is this canyon forming," he told CRMDaily. "[The] world was breaking under our feet, and on one side there was client-server, and on the other was pure Internet architecture. And we had to decide how to [navigate] this chasm."
Conway "made a huge bet and said we have to move to pure Internet architecture."
Smarter Apps Ahead
Davis said future developments will continue along the troika of main user needs: smarter business processes, ease of use and faster implementation. "We have a lot of detailed plans and will continue to push in these three areas." He said that going forward, users can expect to see more focus on making the apps smarter to use, especially in the analytics and marketing automation modules.
Built on a pure XML-based platform, PeopleSoft 8 includes the standard CRM applications of sales, marketing, field service and help desk, as well as more sophisticated functions, such as embedded analytics. |
