Comergent Adds Portal Perks, Lead Management To PRM Suite

Comergent

The company claims that Version 5.6, to be unveiled next week, is the first PRM application to offer the complete gamut of lead management from lead generation, to hand-off to partner, to order fulfillment.

Comergent's goal is to create externally facing applications for use by a vendor's channel partners and customers, said Tom Mescall, senior vice president of product strategy.

Partner management is not handled well by traditional CRM infrastructure, Mescall said. "If you look at sales force automation, call center and marketing automation, they're all for employees -- they do nothing for customers. Customers want order status, inventory, price and delivery information. CRM systems don't answer any of those questions," Mescall said.

A Comergent implementation used by Maytag aggregates information from that company's 3,500 retailers so that customers on the Maytag site get referred to local retailers based on their zip code. From there, the customer can not only see product data, but get inventory, local pricing and haul-away costs immediately, Mescall said.

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The company competes with such vendors as ClickCommerce, ChannelWave, PartnerWare and Allegis, observers said. Earlier this year, ChannelWave said it would use Crystal Decisions' Enterprise as its standard Web reporting and data delivery for its PRM software.

In this down economy, some observers said, vendors must do all they can to cut costs while better serving partners and customers. "Streamlining indirect channels always shows ROI, even in the toughest economic climates," said Louis Columbus, analyst with AMR Research, Boston. Even after the Sept. 11 attacks, AMR's research showed many Fortune 1000 companies moving ahead with PRM implementations, Columbus said.

Comergent's PRM suite already offered product catalog, partner profile management, order management/online quoting, automatic channel inventory and sales forecasting, as well as analytics and reporting capabilities. The Java-based suite supports the must-have Web services standards XML, SOAP, WSDL and UDDI, the company said.