New Epiphany Suite Blends Stand-Alone Modules

This month E.piphany plans to offer an updated CRM suite that will combine heretofore stand-alone marketing, sales and service modules.

E.piphany 6.5's goal is to offer service agents a full view of customer history and enable them to quickly formulate offers to that customer. "Event-driven marketing %85 will identify interesting events in the customer life-cycle and trigger appropriate actions," said Mike Trigg, vice president of product marketing at E.piphany, San Mateo, Calif. "A complaint might be associated with a churn risk, so maybe the agent would offer a 'make-good.' "

The blending together of what were previously separate, "stovepiped" applications is a major trend in the CRM space as vendors seek to offer complete, near-realtime information about a customer's activity, inventory and order status.

The reason CRM has been slammed by analysts for lack of ROI is that it has to date been unable to deliver this single view of the customer, said Cindy Howton, managing director of the CRM practice at BearingPoint, McLean, Va.

"One reason the 360-degree view is so elusive is that organizations have years and years of legacy data,you can't throw that away," Howton said. "Our view is that these component-based architectures will help solve this issue and make it easier to integrate with that legacy data so it can be presented to the agent."

Another key trend is that customers increasingly view their service centers as revenue generators, not cost centers. "They're looking to leverage the investments they've already made in customer service to facilitate additional sales," Howton said.

E.piphany's J2EE-based architecture will combine a data modeling infrastructure "that can define virtual customer data across multiple back-end systems," Trigg said. "We let you define the customer data model independent of where the physical data resides," he added.

The trend among vendors is to expand existing footprints to win more business from current customers.

Oracle, for example, is trying to expand its database stronghold in enterprises and win more of the CRM and ERP applications business. The vendor said that its "suite" approach will outshine best-of-breed offerings from smaller vendors that target more specific needs.

But BearingPoint's Howton said that solution providers work with customers on how to meet those specific needs. "We definitely look at best-of-breed [solutions]," she said.

The price of Epiphany 6.5 starts at $200,000 for a typical implementation, Trigg said.