Here's my perspective/recollection on the origins of the SFA & CIS market space from a vendor's perspective. It's ancient history, but kind of entertaining.
The short version: customer service was a good market, and we just didn't have the resources to get into SFA until later.
The longer version:
In 1990, VNTV was originally known as "Information Workbench". The company was founded to provide a workflow engine that could be embedded as a component of other applications, such as loan processing, ERP, etc. One of the possible applications was customer service. Within a matter of weeks, during the course of initial market research, we realized that the workflow engine concept was so-so, but people were really screaming for an enterprise-class customer service application, so off we went.
Again, in a matter of weeks, we learned of Scopus and Clarify. We knew of Remedy, but felt they were doing something else (indeed, they were). In fact, just before we received our initial investment from Mohr, Davidow Ventures, BIll Davidow told me about Scopus. They had called, looking for VC, with a startingly similar story. We went to visit Scopus with a Mohr, Davidow partner (Peter Roshko) to see if there could be any synergy.
After about 15 minutes, it became pretty clear that each group was interested in remaining independent and that we would be head-to-head competitors. My take at that meeting was that we were smarter, had a better technology, and were more experienced, but that the SCOP guys were unbelivably committed. (Remember the joke about eggs and ham? The chicken was involved. The pig was committed). I knew that SCOP would be a worthy competitor.
Anyway, off we went. CLFY got a headstart with a high profile beta implementation at Silicon Graphics, SCOP had a few wins, and we were still struggling to get the product right. We had made the decision to spend more time upfront architecting the client server aspects, getting the customization tools right, and really understanding the market. It was a scary time, because it looked like we were in third place, right from the beginning. We often wondered if we had made the right decision.
But, within 6 - 9 months, it became clear that CLFY was struggling with implementations, because they had underestimated that customization aspects from account to account. SCOP had invested more in their user interface, but we were hearing scalability concerns. We shipped a product, and thought we had it mostly right at the architectural level, and then it was a matter of grinding out the rest of the product. We also made a commitment to hiring the best possible managers and engineers at all levels without cutting corners. Eventually, we'd pull ahead.
And, time has proven that to be that approach to be right.
At the time, customer support was a much hotter area, as Konehead correctly mentions. Davidow's book was on the way to being a best seller. And the IT market, as well as other areas of the economy, was starting to demand better customer service from vendors. SFA was really fragmented. IT was mostly companies like ACT. In 1990, the demand for enterprise-class SFA wasn't there yet.
Around 1992 or 1993, we started to see more of a demand for SFA. However, the customer service market was still very strong (as it continues to be) and we just flat out didn't have the resources to track other markets. Our engineers, and I'm sure the ones at SCOP and CLFY, were focused on functionality, scalability, user interface, portability across hardware and DBMS platforms. Providing native-quality portability across different desktops (UNIX, Mac, Windows) was a huge battlefield and sucked up incredible resources. Don't forget that the QA resources needed across all of those hardware, DBMS, and desktop was enormous.
Around 1993, a few customers started talking more seriously about basic SFA functionality. Our engineers at VNTV resisted a quick and dirty approach, again wanting to do it right for the long term. At that point, I was trying to get them to build a prototype, which we could show to some early prospects, and then use their feedback to build the "right" product. I thought we could also win a few deals with customers who needed customer service now, and could wait for the promise of a forthcoming SFA product.
I remember that there was a really hot opportunity at Frame Technology (since acquired by Adobe). I couldn't get any engineering time. I actually wrote the first engineering spec and schema for the SFA product (which was really pretty crummy in retrospect - I was a sales VP!) and gave it to Frame, to stall for time. They liked it. SO, I ended up using the VNTV customization tools over a long weekend to build a prototype myself. I got some help from a pre-sales guy, and I think, if memory serves, that Konehead provided some technical help.
Frame liked it. But even better was seeing the faces of our engineers when I showed them a pretty good prototype built by the sales department! And then, we gradually moved into the SFA business.
My understanding is that CLFY and SCOP also sort of eased into SFA, rather than made some big official corporate move. I'm trying to remember when we first heard about SEBL in a meaningful way - I think it wasn't until 1994.
For those of you not familiar with how silicon valley works - in my experience, this is pretty typical of product and market evolution. I know that some of you have a very romantic notion of a bunch of MBA's sitting around doing formal market and product research and coming up with "the answer", but mostly, shit just happens. |
