Comergent Updates PRM Offerings

Comergent E-Business System Release 6 adds a price negotiation module to its order management software that will let vendors set pricing with expiration dates and allow both buyer and seller to negotiate points on the deal, said William York, CTO of the Redwood City, Calif.-based company. The software will calculate volume discounts, too.

The company also enhanced its customer-service dashboard to ensure that a service rep gets the latest view of all customer-specific activities, including called-in status update checks. One Comergent customer estimates that each order is "touched four times" after it is first logged and this feature lets the rep enter change orders quickly and easily, said Tom Mescall, senior vice president of marketing and product strategy.

Comergent's suites--for interactive selling, order management, PRM, and private marketplace--are all built atop J2EE and standards, a fact that endears the packages to at least one west coast integrator.

"Their code is open and accessible, a lot of these other vendors keep much of their code off limits," said the integrator, who asked not to be named. In addition, while Comergent doesn't offer all of the functionality of SAP's CRM and PRM solutions, it does a subset of it very well and rolls out much faster, this integrator said.

Price for each suite starts at $100,000 and can range up to $600,000 depending on usage, the company said.

While Comergent executives said business is brisk, analysts said the sales cycle can be lengthy. "People are buying bite-sized applications, picking a specific pain point and applying a fix. But the sales cycles are tremendously long. You might be closing deals now that you started nine months ago," said Gene Alvarez, vice

president at The Meta Group, a Stamford, Conn., researcher.

Alvarez said that while Comergent has an advantage in price negotiation, there are more than ten key coverage areas in PRM and "each vendor has a lead in some of them."

Comergent competes with such companies as ChannelWave in PRM and with offerings from Siebel Systems and SAP that are expanding from their current application base into PRM. Channelwave 6, due this fall, is expected to add customer service post-sales support and better integration between enterprise systems.