By David Sims
[email protected]
The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music
is – still – Exile On Main Street,
which just never seemed to get taken out of the CD player from yesterday. Might
even see it again tomorrow:
Yesterday afternoon SSA Global Technologies, Inc., a vendor of
extended enterprise solutions and services announced they’re buying CRM vendor Epiphany in a deal worth $329 million, or
$4.20 per share for the shareholders of Epiphany.
Epiphany’s product suite includes sales, service, marketing,
and customer analytics applications, based on a similar services-oriented
architecture and built using the same Java 2 Enterprise Edition technology, as
the recently released SSA Technology Architecture.
Mike Greenough,
chairman, president and CEO of SSA Global said “with Epiphany, we expect to
enhance SSA CRM.”
Epiphany, which styled itself E.piphany until about 2001
when everything “dot-com” became verboten,
overextended themselves a few years ago and never really recovered through
their strategy of concentrating on verticals. Still they had a nice client
roster, including Nestle, the Gap, Citibank, and Microsoft.
Josh Greenbaum,
chief industry analyst for Enterprise Applications Consulting tells industry
observer Ephraim
Schwartz that with moves like this, picking up distressed companies, SSA
is, in Schwartz’s words, “setting itself up to be one of the three or four
major contenders” in the mid-market space.
“It will quickly become SSA versus Microsoft, Oracle, and
SAP,” Greenbaum said, noting that SSA wants to be the one with the biggest
customer base and the most competitive applications: “They already have a
worldwide distribution channel,” Greenbaum tells Schwartz.
Focusing mainly on manufacturing, distribution, and retail,
SSA offers ERP, BPM, product lifecycle management and supplier-relationship
management, Schwartz says.
…
A new report by independent market analyst Datamonitor
finds that analytical customer
relationship management technology, considered the logical evolution of the
CRM lifecycle, is being adopted by
enterprises on a broader global scale.
The report, cleverly titled “Analytical CRM,” forecasts
global enterprise investment in aCRM will grow from an estimated $2.3 billion
today to over $3 billion in 2009, “spelling good news for those technology
vendors that operate in this space.”
That doesn’t sound exactly like an industry blowing wide
open to First CoffeeSM, but hey, were you to promise this columnist
a 30 percent raise between now and 2009 he wouldn’t sneeze at it. Probably
wouldn’t do a back flip, either.
Analytical CRM is generally used by businesses to gain a
fuller – “more full?” “Fuller?” Hmm – understanding of the customer in order to
serve them better, thus increasing customer longevity and generating more
profit. SAS is one of the better-known companies selling in this space.
Tom Pringle, technology analyst at Datamonitor and author of
the study said to really sell analytical CRM, “vendors will need to make every
effort to educate enterprises. Many are still confused by the concept and
technologies that constitute business intelligence.”
Analytics users break down to power users – you know who
you are – who need the fanciest and latest tools and toys, and actually know
what to do with them. You have your senior execs, who like easy-to-understand dashboards
detailing performance against key performance indicators.
Marketing organizations are probably the largest group of analytics
users, sales organizations could be, but a lot of the analytics useful to sales
comes “in the output of other area’s analysis,” according to
Datamonitor – for example, “the use of leads generated through marketing
campaigns, timely information delivery, especially during closing periods when
targets are either hit, or missed.”
Naturally customer-facing organizations, such as the
call center, but also retail environments depend on timely and accurate
delivery of information relating to the customers they are dealing with, which
is analytics’ purview, and, strangely enough, customers are users. Offer your
customers intelligence about the way they use your products and see if they don’t
appreciate it.
Financial services – as expected, retail, manufacturing and
communications firms tend to be the heaviest users of analytics.
…
Here’s a little company starting to show up on radar: CoreTrac,
Inc., provider of ResourceOne, a simple, affordable CRM and sales
force automation product for community financial institutions, is announcing
that Rabobank, N.A., of El Centro,
California, will use R1 as part of its
strategy to expand its retail and commercial business. Rabobank, N.A. is the
U.S. retail banking arm of the Rabobank Group.
In April, Rabobank, N.A. converted to a national charter to expand its retail
banking capabilities outside California. They’ll use R1 to help manage its
sales process by tracking referrals, reporting results and providing employees
with referral information across all its markets. The application is designed
to integrate with the bank’s existing vital banking systems.
Some 40 community financial institutions are using or are
licensed to use CoreTrac’s R1. In addition to the steady increase in its
customer base, CoreTrac got some traction when one of the country’s largest
community banking trade associations, the California Bankers Association, named
CoreTrac its Endorsed CRM Partner last year.
…
Message Technologies, Inc., a speech IVR
vendor, is announcing this morning “significantly
reduced hosting rates” based on MTI’s addition of Microsoft Speech Server and
its Speech Application Language Tags specification.
MTI provides a per-minute hosting rate of 5 cents for
low-volume requirements as well as volume discounts as capacity requirements
increase. When it comes to moving CRM apps to speech, says MTI President
Darrell Knight, “we are finding that our… prices are driving more customers
towards MSS as their platform of choice.”
…
Damn. We lost one of the good ones. First CoffeeSM
is saddened to learn that brave reporter Stephen Vincent was murdered by terrorists in
Iraq yesterday.
Unlike most “reporters” “covering” Iraq, who rip, read and
rewrite the news the military provides from the field, tossing in the required “leave
the whole place to the terrorists” slant, Vincent spent months seeing the reality
for himself all across the country. It’s called “reporting,” something few other
“reporters” in Iraq do. He came to love Iraq and Iraqis deeply, and to learn
the things that would get him killed.
Michael Rubin, editor of The Middle East Quarterly
told NRO
yesterday “hands-down, [Vincent’s] book In the Red Zone was the most
accurate portrayal of the issues facing ordinary Iraqis. While reporters from major newspapers had fixers do their work and
more often than not, just telephoned Iraqi politicians and anonymous American
diplomats, Vincent got out and about to
holistically explore the entire Iraq endeavor, from the bottom up. His
vignettes offer the best English-language understanding of Iraq available. His work was far and away the best out
there.”
His was also a highly positive view, the result of seeing
beyond Baghdad hotel windows, beyond which most of the “journalists” in Iraq
don’t dare venture. Vincent learned first-hand the tremendous good coalition
forces are doing in Iraq, how the country is being not only rebuilt, but built
far beyond what it was under Saddam, and how respected and appreciated the
American and British forces are among the vast majority of Iraqis.
Find In the Red Zone
and read it. There’s a good sampling of his work on NRO. Irritate
the terrorists who murdered him by knowing the truth they
killed him for writing.
Ah, damn it all. Damn, damn, damn.
If read off-site hit http://blog.tmcnet.com/telecom-crm/
for the fully-linked version. First CoffeeSM accepts no sponsored
content.
