E.piphany Cuts 15 Percent Of Workforce

E.piphany

Most of the layoffs involved sales and sales management staff, the spokeswoman said, adding that E.piphany remains focused on customer support and product development. The company, based here, remains financially sound and has $300 million in cash in the bank, she noted.

President and CEO Roger Siboni explained the job cuts in a companywide e-mail dated May 13. "As difficult as things are today, I don't believe the severity of the downturn in the economy has yet been as pronounced as the irrational exuberance of the go-go days of 1999 and 2000," Siboni said in the e-mail. "We should not be counting on a rapid and meaningful economic recovery anytime soon. My guess is that we have another 12 to 24 months of intense competition and rugged selling ahead of us until 'normalcy' returns."

Indeed, competition in the CRM software space has escalated in recent months. Players from other software segments, such as PeopleSoft and Oracle, have entered the CRM fray against market leader Siebel Systems at the high end, and the industry is awaiting Microsoft's market entry with its own CRM offering at the low end. New players, such as Salesforce.com, also are building a CRM presence.

E.piphany's strength lies in its analytics and marketing applications expertise, industry observers say. In March, E.piphany announced it was unifying its CRM suite around Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) and that it would eventually do so for Microsoft .Net as well.