THIS MONTH IN THE FRONT OFFICE
General Front Office News
Consulting company Ovum released a report cautioning potential customers that, despite vendors' claims, there really is no single CRM company that properly covers all the bases. "Current CRM offerings tend to specialize in one channel or another, and one function or another - so resulting in products which are very good at supporting field sales operations, but with no support for call center operations, and so on. But since all vendors claim and
promote the same functionality-based message, it is difficult to distinguish what channels each vendor actually serves best. Because none of the products support all access channels equally, companies choosing software will have to carefully match up the channels for which they require support against vendor offerings."
IDC issued a report that Siebel has grown from being the 24th largest cross-industry software provider in 1997 to the 8th largest in 1998 (thanks partly, of course, to its acquisition of Scopus.) It was the fastest growing provider. "IDC splits the cross-industry applications market into 10 segments: accounting, human resources/payroll, materials management, project management, maintenance management, sales force automation, marketing automation, customer support and field service, word processing, and business performance measurement." Whereas the entire cross-industry software sales industry grew 18% in 1998, the CRM sub-industry grew 50%.
The four front office companies in our Gorilla Game
VANTIVE
When Vantive's new CEO pre-announced very disappointing expectations that were later confirmed in their earnings report (more about that later), he also fired the company's COO and president. Both positions were held by the same person. Most senior management execs will now report directly to the CEO. The press release about that made it perfectly clear that the CEO holds his management team accountable. It took on the tone of "Execute or be executed."
SIEBEL
Great Plains Software, a mid-market back-office provider, has teamed with Siebel. The 1400 Great Plains worldwide resellers will be promoting Great Plains Siebel Front Office, a product designed for the mid-market. The product is integrated with the Great Plains back-office solutions.
The Siebel Enterprise Connector, out-of-the-box software that "connects" Siebel's front office products to SAP's R/3 platform, was made available this month.
The data that comprises Dun & Bradstreet's profiles of companies will be included in a new product called the Siebel D&B Integrated Solution. Instead of having to obtain D&B information outside the realm of front office software, it will be a valuable built-in tool for credit managers and sales forces.
REMEDY
Though Remedy remains primarily a help desk provider, the company hopes to further expand its front office offerings beyond their core competency. The company announced the acquisition of Pipestream Technologies, a provider of sales force automation software. Taking on Siebel in SFA? Probably smarter than to make Vantive's mistake.
CLARIFY
No significant news that came across my monitor.
The Big Boyz
Now that the front office has attracted sufficient attention to be attractive to the larger companies of which the front office is only a part of their business, I will from here on out be giving more attention to those developments.
When IBM bought Software Artistry a couple years ago (I'm terrible at accurately remembering time frames.)it was absorbed by their network management susbsidiary, Tivoli. About a year ago or less, IBM used Software Artistry as a core of a newly created, wholly owned front office subsidiary with an independent board. The subsidiary was called Corepoint. This month, IBM changed strategies yet again. Corepoint was dissolved and all front office initiatives were rolled into IBM's e-commerce and messaging units.
From a gorilla gamer's point of view, it's clear that IBM has not been having the desired success with their front office initiatives or they wouldn't have changed strategies so often. Less important though interesting, is that Corepoint was shut down very quietly. There were no press releases I could find and I only learned about it from one brief article. Execs who headed up Corepoint were offered other positions in IBM but all of them declined. Hmmmm.
"As part of its drive to become the leader in the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) market, Oracle Corp. today announced the creation of a dedicated CRM solutions organization consisting of CRM Solution Sales, Consulting and Alliances, and the appointment of Craig Brennan as senior vice president of CRM Solutions. In addition to Brennan's CRM Solution Sales responsibilities, he will build a global, world-class delivery capability for Oracle(R) CRM solutions consisting of Oracle Alliance partners, Oracle Consulting and Oracle Support Services and Education."
"SAP Begins Rollout Of E-Commerce-Based CRM Package:
SAP took a step closer to delivering on a delayed suite of customer relationship management applications. The company is shipping the SAP Internet Pricing and Configurator, a component of a much-anticipated CRM package that will allow companies to let their customers, distributors, and salespeople calculate prices and configure product features for merchandise over the Internet. SAP says it plans to deliver more E-commerce-oriented CRM applications, namely mobile sales and service business scenarios, by the end of 1999."
NCR's Relationship Optimizer was unveiled just this week as a CRM solution that focuses on customer events instead of product features and benefits. As an example, consider how that concept applies to a bank. "By spotting a large funds transfer and then engaging the customer in dialog they found out the funds were to be a wedding present for another member of the customer's family -- a house down payment. As a result, the bank was then able to help the young couple set up home and provide the financial services to them -- an opportunity a traditional campaign based approach would have missed." The Optimizer acts as a stand-alone product or as part of the integrated CRM solutions for the financial, communications, insurance and airline industries.
"PricewaterhouseCoopers, SAS Institute Inc. and Exchange Applications announced today that they will work together to deliver enterprise customer relationship management (CRM) solutions." From a managing partner of Pricewaterhouse, "Delivering customer data warehousing solutions that integrate marketing automation solutions with applications such as sales force automation, call centers, ERP solutions, and Web-based channels, has become a significant part of PricewaterhouseCoopers' business. We are pleased to team with SAS Institute and Exchange Applications in order to provide our clients with world-class data warehousing, data mining and campaign management technology. SAS Enterprise Miner and VALEX enable companies to leverage valuable integrated customer information."
For news and information about our four gorilla gamers' quarterly results and the Game itself, see my next post that uses the fixed font that makes the numbers readable. It may be awhile, though. Lunch comes first! :)
--Mike Buckley
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