E.piphany Upgrades CRM Around J2EE

Next week, E.piphany is unifying its CRM suite around Java 2, Enterprise Edition (J2EE)--and eventually .Net as well. This week, Peoplesoft and Siebel Systems updated their CRM offerings with better mobile support.

E.piphany's E.6 lineup, the bulk of which will ship later this month, boasts a new common J2EE-based platform to run underneath all of the company's analytics, marketing, sales and service products, said Phil Fernandez, executive vice president of products. In addition, the line will sport a new "third-generation" Web user interface that offers a drag-and-drop interface and direct manipulation, Fernandez said.

"We did a pretty good job of unifying the interface with E.5, but E.6 brings along the back-end unification on J2EE and also provides a suite of designer tools to help configure applications around best-practice processes, verticals and business rules," Roger Siboni, president and CEO of E.Piphany, told CRN.

The company's embrace of J2EE, as well as planned support for Microsoft's .Net, make its lineup more suited to the evolving Web services model, analysts and integrators said. "We're designed to plug and play" with other systems, Fernandez said.

Integrators said E.6 goes a long way to tie together technologies and offerings E.piphany has purchased along the way. "Let's face it, they've bought a lot of stuff. This provides a unifying architecture," said Neal Levin, managing director of KPMG Consulting, Chicago.

In the past two years, E.piphany bought RightPoint along with Radnet technologies, Octane Software and Moss Software in a series of stock deals.

"E.piphany struggled with buying a lot of software-- Octane on the service side, Rightpoint for realtime, Moss for sales automation. The company started out as an analytics provider and E.6 is the culmination of its move not only to Java and J2EE, but to consolidation of business rules, application logic, data administration and development tools. They've built a common platform for all," said Steve Bonadio, analyst with The Meta Group.

Also new in E.6 is Dialogs, which will help integrators offer call centers realtime access to customer information regardless of whether it was entered via the Web, phone or in stores.

With Dialog, the call center representative gets realtime updates on the caller's activity, said Kyle Prendergast, marketing director for Interelate, an Eden Prairie, Minn., integrator.

"It's multichannel, so if a customer starts to fill out an online survey and only completes questions one through five and then calls in, the call center person will see that and not have to repeat those five questions," Prendergast said.

A common complaint about CRM systems is the disconnection between various "silos" of data. A caller entering their phone number into an automated system for example, often has to repeat that number to the service rep all over again.

Matt Doyel, chief CRM architect for Reflect.com, San Francisco, said e.piphany's offering provides a wider view of corporate selling and support activities than its competition. "My marketers and analyst can have a single app on their desktop for an entire view of the business vs. other vendors that offer disparate pieces to be joined together," he said.

On the mobile front, Peoplesoft CRM 8.4 adds support for laptops running Windows CE. The company will wait to see whether it needs to support the Palm OS for even smaller machines.

Siebel 7 Mobile Solutions, officially unveiled this week, supports wireless messaging connections to Research In Motion Blackberry handhelds and wireless phones. The technology also opens up e-business information to WAP devices or HTML browsers on mobile phones or other handheld devices.

CRM as a category is in flux now, with Microsoft officially putting its toe in the water with MS CRM, due later this year. That offering targets companies with 25 or more people without IT staffs, but most observers expect that product over time to creep upward into accounts with hundreds of employees.

Giga Information Group's Erin Kinikin concurs that over time MS CRM will eventually displace Siebel Great Plains Front Office as the Microsoft-labeled CRM offering of choice for the mid market.

"Siebel just lost its midmarket channel last week [at the MS CRM launch," Kinikin said. "It's not reasonable to assume the Great Plains resellers will continue selling Siebel when there's a Microsoft-Great Plains-labeled solution. Siebel has a year to 18 months to build their channel program," she noted.

But Siebel Midmarket edition, which is what Great Plains bundles, is not necessarily well suited to its target audience, observers said, citing its complexity. "Look at J.D. Edwards. It bought a CRM package and sold more CRM in two quarters with its [Youcentric thing than it did in two years with Siebel," Kinikin said.