So, Tell Me a Little Bit About Yourself 0 comments

If you know nothing about a company, you should be able to figure out the bare essentials by visiting its About Us page, right?

Turns out this is only true sometimes.

When visiting the Digg website, for example. The first line on Digg’s About page is this: “Digg is a place for people to discover and share content from anywhere on the web.”

Neat, huh? One click and sixteen words after visiting the site, you know, in a nutshell, what they do. Read another fifty or so words and you’ll find out that content is displayed and ranked based on votes from users. Go further and you’ll find out how that works. The information is there, and it’s not hard to find.

Enterprise software vendors, by contrast, don’t always provide such clear information so concisely. To show you what I mean, I looked at the About Us pages of the ten vendors listed in The New and the Noteworthy: 2008 Vendor Wrap-up, published late last year on this blog.

I wasn’t looking for anything spectacular. I only wanted to know, as quickly as possible, what each company does, whom they do it for, and what, if anything, sets them apart. Here’s what I found:
The Top 3: Flexi, Oco, and Saba

Of the ten pages I looked at, Flexi, Oco, and Saba provided the best examples of what an About Us page should be.

Flexi’s About Us page was almost exactly what I wanted to see. In a mere 136 words, I learned that Flexi develops two accounting products for the banking, insurance, and financial services industries. Further I learned that Flexi focuses exclusively on accounting, which supports their claim of deep industry expertise. Additional information was available from a clear set of links at the top of the page, so if I had approached the site as a reporter, investor, or job-seeker, I’d have known where to go.

Bonus points for linking from the About Us page to the overview pages for each of their products.

Oco also provides a concise description of their company. 211 words in, I learned that Oco provides on-demand reporting and analytics for any kind of business data; that the industries they serve include retail, manufacturing, consumer packaged goods, and private equity firms; and that Oco’s solutions are fixed-time and fixed-cost.

While Oco gets bonus points for differentiating their solution in clear language, I did find it odd that the term “business intelligence” only appears at the end of the description. Still, it’s a solid overview, and I wanted to learn more.

Saba was originally destined for the middle of the pack, but a second look convinced me otherwise. It turns out that their About Us page tells me what they do—provide human capital management (HCM)—software, lists key customers, and lets me know that their software is available “both on-premise and on demand,” which is a pretty good start. Again, the description is short enough to be readable, and informative enough that I can decide whether I want to follow the links to more information. The only downside is that the main description begins only after a huge plug for their corporate brochure, which I wasn’t interested enough to download. Oh well.
The Middle of the Road: Global, IFS, PTC, Targit

The companies I thought provided fair to middling About Us pages all tended to have the same problem. While most of the information was there, it usually wasn’t presented as well as it could have been.

For example, Global Shop Solutions starts off well, making it clear that they are the “largest privately held ERP software company in the United States.” Unfortunately, you have to read quite a bit more before you find out about the size and industry of the typical Global customer. Generally speaking, I found the information I was looking for, but I had to hunt around for it since nothing on the page indicated what was important.

IFS is another example of good information with lackluster presentation. Oddly, the IFS About Us page has two short descriptions of the company, but only one (the less visible one) actually tells you what kind of software they make (ERP and MRO). To their credit, they do immediately differentiate themselves, citing a commitment to using open standards. Good to know. The frustrating thing here was that The About Us page links to a page titled “IFS in Brief,” which actually has more and better information, and would have made a better About Us page to begin with.

PTC’s About Us page isn’t exactly packed with information, and most of the links to additional information are only available from the site’s main menu. However PTC gets big points for doing two things. First, the description is very concise, letting you know that the company makes product lifecycle management (PLM) and enterprise content management (ECM) software. Second, and most important, each of those terms is linked to a page that describes exactly what PLM and ECM are. In an industry drowning in three-letter acronyms (TLAs), it’s refreshing to see a company stop and offer some helpful information for newbies like me. Thanks, PTC.

Lastly, there’s Target Business Intelligence. On the plus side, it’s immediately clear that the company makes BI software. Unfortunately, their About Us page doesn’t do much to expand on that. Instead, it talks about the company’s size, number of customers, partnership agreements, philosophy, and corporate culture. This is all good information, but it’s not as useful as it could be if I had a clear picture of the company’s products and target markets to begin with. On the other hand, one very nice thing about Targit’s About Us page is that it links directly to an online product demo and some videos, which are always useful.
The Bottom 3: Callidus, Ramco, and Visibility

Let’s start with Callidus. Their About Us pages actually do provide the type of information I was looking for. They made the bottom three because their presentation makes that information so difficult to find, that the overall experience is frustrating. To get a comprehensive one-pager about the company, you have to go the main About Us page, then follow the “Why Callidus Software?” link. Then you have to find and click the “Corporate Backgrounder” link, which takes you, finally, to a useful page (which, IMO should be the main about us page).

The real bummer is that Callidus does some nice things on this page. For example, like PTC, Callidus links to definitions of the types of software they make—sales performance management (SPM) and enterprise incentive management (EIM). They also provide concise descriptions of all of their products, provide some details about the underlying technology, and list some of the business problems that their software helps solve. Shame that it takes them so long to get there.

Then there’s Ramco and Visibility. Both of these companies have apparently decided to let visitors guess what they do. Neither About Us page provides a clear or concise description of the company or its products, opting instead for vague marketing-speak.

For example, the Visibility About Us page begins “Visibility Corporation provides business and technical solutions that help organizations achieve optimal results from their business information systems.” OK, but what is a “business and technical solution?” Do any companies make similar solutions that help organizations achieve sub-optimal results?

Visibility also assures us that “Optimizing productivity and recognizing an immediate return on investment are common business drivers for the organizations we serve.” Again, do any of their competitors serve companies who want to reduce productivity, or see ROI later, rather than sooner?

About the only useful piece of information on this page is that “Visibility provides solutions that range from easy-to-deploy, high impact reporting and analytic solutions to comprehensive integrated enterprise applications, to applications built to address your specific business needs,” which I guess means that they offer solutions ranging from small and off-the-shelf to large and custom.

To be fair, the Visibility home page makes it immediately clear that the company makes enterprise resource planning (ERP) and business intelligence (BI) solutions. Why they don’t reiterate it in their company profile is a bit of a mystery.

Ramco is in pretty much the same boat, claiming to provide, “flexible enterprise applications that can be delivered quickly and cost-effectively into complex environments.” But what vendor would claim the opposite?

The description goes on to say that Ramco “…also gives companies the agility they need to stay competitive by enabling fast, flexible deployment and change on demand of business applications. Ramco VirtualWorks ensures maximum flexibility to execute a business process strategy - so when business needs change systems change automatically.”

Sounds challenging. Um… what is VirtualWorks again?

You won’t find out on this page. Nor will you find out on their home page, which at least lists their target markets. So if you want any real information, it’s off to their network of drop-down menus in the hopes that you can identify what you want to know.
So Why is This Important, Anyway?

The reason I’m going on about this is that a company’s About Us page is important. And while it needs to address myriad audiences—journalists, investors, students, job-seekers—its most important purpose is to provide clear information (like what the company actually does) to potential customers.

Put another way, if I’m tasked with purchasing a new software system, I need to evaluate many competing software solutions. Chances are, I don’t have as much time as I need, so when I visit a company’s website, I’m going to make some immediate decisions based on

* Whether the company provides the kind of software I’m looking for
* Whether the company serves other customers in my industry
* Whether the company serves businesses of the same size as mine
* Whether the company does one or more of these things in a way that’s demonstrably better than its competitors

That’s the information I need right away, and if I don’t get it, or don’t understand it, I’ll probably look elsewhere.

I’m not saying that all companies can be as concise as Digg (who does one thing, does it well, and does it for free), but there’s no reason that every company can’t tell me, in 50 words or less, enough about what they do to keep me interested.

Clear information, well presented, makes me feel like the company behind it values my time and respects my intelligence, and that engenders the kind of goodwill that’s very much to the company’s benefit when I get serious about making my selection.

Of course none of this speaks to the quality of software offered by any of these companies. All of them were singled out by TEC analysts as deserving some special mention, and no doubt they can all be proud of their products. My point is that in many cases, the blog post that praised these companies offered better descriptions of their products and services than the companies’ own websites. Go figure.

Oracle Claims The Worst Is Over And Turns To KISS For A Boost 0 comments

In June Oracle Corporation (NASDAQ: ORCL), the largest database provider and one of the largest providers of software applications for e-business, unveiled a new suite of online services aimed at capturing the small business market. It also announced changes to appeal to its larger customers, as well as its quarterly financial results.

The question is "where can any one gain the competitive advantage and differentiation if all the peers are using the same business processes?" Therefore, as other established players will have made every effort to deliver integrated hybrid bundles of best-of-breed point solutions, it is unlikely that the high-end market is going to buy Oracle's integrated solution mantra - flexibility and differentiation are still the words more valued in this environment. The fact remains that most of Oracle's potential large customers already possess heterogeneous solutions for their overall business requirement; most of them also have significant man-hours invested in legacy code are not willing to throw away. Even in the unlikely scenario of these customers deciding to replace existing components with Oracle's, Oracle would face a challenge of integrating with other vendors' software.

Oracle, however, has been a pragmatic company, and it will likely modify its strategy and try another tack, although not necessarily publicly acknowledging it. Departing from the controversial processor power unit pricing or from its initial insistence on hosting servers for its customers are good examples of the company listening to the market buzz. It would not be a surprise to see Oracle modify its adamant stance of 'no modifications', at least in the high end of the market. Just do not expect Oracle to port its applications to other database platforms.

The fact that Oracle's database still maintains the lion share amongst the SAP or Siebel customer base despite these vendors announcing IBM DB2 as their primary database may indicate the strength of the product. It is not completely inconceivable to see some Oracle-technology 'religious' users opting for going for Oracle Applications due to their seamless integration to the database and due to a strong development environment, on condition that Oracle commits to delivering the needed product enhancements within a reasonable period of time. Some components of the Oracle 11i suite may already provide a good fit for some industries without the need for any modifications, as illustrated in the above customer case studies. However, Oracle will have to maintain much closer ties with its customers and to listen to their voices, which has not been the case yet despite encouraging steps to bridge the gap with the independent Oracle Applications User Group (OAUG) (for more information, see Oracle (Finally) Learning and Applying Its Own CRM).

On the other hand, Oracle's 'one-stop' shop mantra should be a compelling message for the lower-end of the market. We were made aware of Oracle's success within the mid-market with its Fast Forward Flows programs. The fact that first-time Oracle users experienced smooth 11i implementations may be encouraging for other prospects, too. Smaller and fledgling enterprises often have undeveloped or sub-optimally developed processes and, therefore, they might benefit from leveraging Oracle's experiences in refining these and might find the Oracle Small Business Suite attractive. One should expect more fine-tuning iterations of this strategy in the future though, since the magic formula of the applications hosting success (in terms of pricing, service level agreements (SLA), etc.) has not yet been discovered. But, the move is strategically wise - it is better to fight Microsoft's bCentral offering on its ground before it comes to the enterprise market with its recent acquisition of Great Plains (see Microsoft And Great Plains - A Friendship That Turned Into A Marriage). The move is also a counteractive measure to SAP's and PeopleSoft's apparent onslaught on the lower-end of the market (see SAP Claims Big Gains In The Low-End Battleground and PeopleSoft Joins The Hunt For SMEs).

As a summary, increased competitive pressure on many fronts, and lingering mixed perceptions about the 11i Applications suite, leaves Oracle at a crossroads for sustaining the momentum it had the last year. Should 11i.4 demonstrate maturity and should Oracle start orchestrating its product releases in smaller, more manageable chunks and improve relationships with OAUG, system integrators and consulting partners, Oracle's prospects will continue to be rosy, although probably less glowing than a year ago. Oracle product strategy, marketing and execution will have to be clear and spot on though. To that end, look for Oracle's more aggressive 'the turnkey e-business' message (and a tacit soul-searching continuation) for some time to come.

AT&T WorldNet Attempts a Unified "Buddy-List" But the Chance for Success is Slim 0 comments

AT&T WorldNet Attempts a Unified "Buddy-List" But the Chance for Success is Slim

Two weeks ago Microsoft withdrew from the concept of an integrated Instant Messaging (IM) system due to roadblocks from AOL/Netscape's Instant Messenger. Simply put, as soon as Microsoft enhanced the MSN IM system to enable communications with AOL's IM system, AOL's code was changed repeatedly to prevent communication between the two systems. The IM market is known for being predatory in nature, as each system attempts to cannibalize the market as a whole.

The proprietary IM systems draw attention to the vendors website for the purposes of direct e-commerce sales, which are particularly hot during the holiday season. AT&T has partnered with Tribal Voice, a leader in IM innovation, to create a unified IM system. The product is freely downloadable today but will be blocked by both MSN and AOL within the course of the next 7 days (probability 90%), rendering the IM system useless for the purposes of communication with either AOL or MSN. AT&T's IM system will continue to function normally with AT&T WorldNet subscribers.

Xchange Adds To The List Of CRM Point Solutions' Casualties 0 comments

According to many recent reports in the press, it appears that Xchange, Inc. , once one of the leading marketing automation and analytics providers, has very recently closed down its operations. Xchange was founded by Andy Frawley in 1994 as Exchange Applications Inc. The news possibly comes as not a big surprise to informed market observers and/or to many of the company's customers, as it had at least for over a year been in a very difficult financial situation, and, consequently, it had frantically explored possible survival options like finding a buyer after a major restructuring in 2002 and/or seeking a deal to return to a privately-held status. However, having not succeeded at either, and when the cash was completely burned up, the vendor had no choice but to abruptly seize its operations after the bank foreclosure.

The company had hemorrhaged money for several years, and its stock was de-listed from NASDAQ last year. During the past two months, it has further shed 75 employees, albeit at its prime, it employed 450. Its assets, including a notable customer base in Financial Services and Insurance (e.g., Citigroup, Citibank, Allstate, JP Morgan Chase, Fidelity, etc.), Retail (e.g., Bose, Gateway, Circuit City, Staples, etc.), and Telecommunications sectors (e.g., Sprint, Verizon, etc.), were auctioned off on March 11. The auction was reportedly held at the law offices of Reimer and Braunstein LLP in Boston and included everything from customer contracts and patents to computers, equipment, and office furniture, according to reports.

Initially, allegedly over 20 companies expressed interest in buying Xchange's assets, and in maintaining its products and supporting its customers, including direct competitors Chordiant Software, DoubleClick, SAS and Unica. While marketing management software vendor Unica was initially marked as a very likely buyer of the company, the vendor, however, announced on March 10 that it had elected not to make a bid for the Xchange's assets. Rather, Unica has announced a migration plan from Xchange's solutions to its Affinium platform. The vendor has reportedly decided not to participate in the auction, because Xchange's main assets — the software developers — were likely no longer with it. Also, Unica has already migrated approximately 15% of Xchange's customer base to Affinium, and the vendor touts that regardless of which company takes ultimate ownership of Xchange's remaining assets, converting to Affinium will be the most attractive solution for Xchange customers.

Consequently, given Unica's and DoubleClick's absence from the bidding, the winning bidder was Amdocs (NASDAQ: DOX), a provider of billing systems, customer care and support for the communications industry. Amdocs, which was not initially expected to be a strong bidder, reportedly outbid SAS to win the Xchange's remains for slightly more than $5 million. Although not a stranger to CRM products acquisitions given its earlier acquisition of the former leading CRM product Clarify in 2001 for $200 million (see Clarity of Vision: Clarify Sold to Amdocs by Nortel ), its latest acquisition of Xchange has raised many eyebrows. Amdocs does not have a blissful track record with the former purchase so far. To be fair, Amdocs has not exactly left the ClarifyCRM product in the dust, given the release of ClarifyCRM 11 in September 2002, which featured thin client support, a process manager module, and an XML-based integration gateway.

On the other hand, even during 2002, while battling to secure new finances, Xchange surprisingly managed to build a strong real-time engine to deliver targeted promotions based capability to detect important customer events and behaviors from transactional data throughout multiple marketing channels within an enterprise. Even as late as January 9, 2003 the company announced the release of its Xchange 9 browser-based suite that enables marketers to automatically trigger an appropriate communication to the customer immediately after they exhibit a behavior representing a cross-sell, up-sell, or retention opportunity, and that thereby answers the question when' to initiate a marketing interaction. Further, the Xchange 9 EDM (Event Driven Marketing) Option allows users the ability to observe data from multiple sources within the enterprise, look for changes to the state' of the customer, and action the direct marketing via the Xchange 9 platform, which is in contrast to leveraging historical information using traditional data mining tools or writing complex SQL-based queries to produce new predictive models long after the marketing opportunity has past.

In addition to full integration with EDM, Xchange 9 included the following new capabilities compared to Xchange 8:

* Single Sign-On

* Request Runner Utility the ability to run campaigns on demand using a simple command line utility

* Browser-based Format Viewer

* Support for Web Services Standards (i.e., SOAP and WDSL), and

* Offer Disposition Tracking the ability to better gauge effectiveness of real time campaigns

One may sound too wise after the event, but the writing on the wall had long been visible for Xchange, and for many like marketing campaign management specialists. The CRM market remains both the land of opportunity but with many treacherous patches of quicksand for those that are not certain about their footprint breadth in the field. It has been a no brainer' the fact that the 2000s have been adverse years in the entire enterprise applications market. Following the whopping growth rates of the late 1990s, and the spending surge on sexy e-Business-related technology in 2000, hard times worldwide and in almost all sectors have since subsequently morphed into harrowing times for all enterprise systems providers alike. While the biggest and/or the richest have been able to hang onto flat new sales, possibly modest declines, or in other cases possibly modest growth, only a lucky and/or the most apt few with a true differentiation in a selected number of markets (e.g., supply chain execution (SCE)) have even bucked the trend and have shown some enviable growth.

It might be interesting to analyze the recent years of enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM) markets to discern how fortunes may often fluctuate and go in different directions. The term ERP, if not necessarily coming back into fashion, certainly is no longer a bad, pass' term of a few years ago, when almost all vendors were distancing themselves from the association (like from a plague) because ERP was then perceived as off-putting (i.e., intra-enterprise vs. entire supply chain and collaboration focus). At the same time, anything associated with customer or front-office interaction was all the rage, attracting both venture capitalists to pour their capital into new startup companies with brave ideas, while the customers were (over)buying these applications owing to then buoyant economy and the apparent need to better manage seemingly mushrooming customer bases.

The appeal of marketing automation has come from its ability to tailor marketing campaigns and to track their effectiveness and control marketing costs and to perform better targeted, finer-grained, multi-stage campaigns. Having also gathered a number of high-profile early adopter customers worldwide, and enticed by then large market capitalizations, Xchange had followed suit and had gone public (NASDAQ: EXAP), and little did it know then about the upcoming dot-com implosion and economic downturn.

Recently however, while not exactly in its prime, ERP bears its ripe middle age well, while CRM vendors are largely finding other creative ways to describe their purpose (e.g., "a leading extended e-Business solutions provider"). Having experienced a rude awakening from an extreme and often unjustifiable enamor with dot-com's non-viable business models, and owing to a backpedaled growth of yesterday's hot items like CRM, supply chain management (SCM) or e-procurement, many experts have suddenly again had an epiphany about the importance of solid back office transactional systems. Namely, there is a renewed recognition that ERP is imperative to managing and controlling internal materials movements and processes, and it forms the foundation for collaboration, e-Business, CRM, SCM and so forth.

Some pundits have even reverted to predicting moderate growth for the ERP market despite unfavorable economic conditions. Therefore, while the traditional introspective mind-set of ERP becomes history, its functionality remains critical. The 'new economy' will not have caused the obsolescence of general ledger and accounts payable & receivable for example. Quite the contrary, it will have only emphasized their importance.

Destiny or not, the near-death experiences of many ERP players, which will almost all have meanwhile found another proprietor, had marked the end of an era when robust, inward-oriented enterprise transaction-crunching product suites were a guarantee of success. Today's enterprise applications are required as a matter of course to address more than the processes taking place within the walls of an enterprise.

While Web-enablement and collaborative e-business will continue to be a major direction, easier enterprise applications integration/interconnectivity, more flexible pricing, embracement of plug-and-play' applications that support commonly accepted standards (reflecting a reduced need to heavily customize multi-vendor solutions), and embedding analytical applications, knowledge management (KM), and business process management (BPM) are some of the best prospects among the ongoing wave of enterprise applications hot-buttons. It is needless to say that almost all traditional ERP vendors (small and big alike) had to experience a wake up call' and have long been trying to expand their product offering in tune with the ever-changing trends and requirements of the new collaborative economy.

Xchange Adds To The List Of CRM Point Solutions' Casualties Part Two: Market Impact & User Recommendations 0 comments

According to many recent reports in the press, it appears that Xchange, Inc., once one of the leading marketing automation and analytics providers, has very recently closed down its operations. Part One of this note discussed the specifics of the Xchange demise and related it to the changing nature of the ERP market. It also noted that almost all traditional ERP vendors (small and big alike) had to experience a wake up call' and have long been trying to expand their product offering in tune with the ever-changing trends and requirements of the new collaborative economy.

To that end, over the last few years, all significant enterprise applications players have been actively partnering or finding other ways to provide solutions that allow businesses to collaborate more effectively. Consequently, the boundaries between ERP, CRM, e-commerce and SCM have meanwhile blurred so much that any attempt to functionally separate them becomes ever more pointless. If the ultimate objective is to win and retain customers, one must consider the entire chain, which includes traditional ERP and SCM functions as well as the once considered more remarkable and supposedly more relevant CRM and e-commerce activity

The cycle begins with the attraction of the customer through sales and marketing. This hopefully results in an order management and fulfillment process and ends with a customer service, which can involve anything from field installations through to enquiry and complaint management. All of these steps have to be executed well without exception. Otherwise, the customer will end up on a competitor's list of customers. Therefore, the relative importance of CRM vs. ERP, ERP vs. SCM or of any other match-up is irrelevant. All of these functional areas are critical, except for some esoteric or autistic businesses that can go by with implementing islands of information. The 64,000-dollar question is how all business processes work together. In the electronic world, the degree of flexibility and efficiency of collaborative processes relating to the customer lifecycle, product lifecycle, and so on, to name but a few, will be a big determinant of losers and winners.

Incidentally, Applix, with its recent exit from the CRM market (see Will A Big Fish's Splash Cause Minnows' Flush Out Of The CRM Pond?), may exemplify the other side of the CRM medal nowadays, as droves of smaller pure CRM vendors have been hard pressed to survive owing to the combined effect of CRM users' disenchantment with the products' hardly ever materialized benefits, after a hasty infatuation with its touted silver bullet' mantra (which once also happened to its older sibling ERP's users), compounded with the tight IT budgets due to the worldwide economic recovery delay and with Microsoft's entry into already crowded place. Although many mid-market pure-CRM solutions have been maturing and improving, they must continue to facilitate integration with back-end systems, given the increasing awareness of this need for full-fledged benefits of CRM. Further, they must also provide the differentiation through verifiable return on investment (ROI) metrics, and indispensable features and functions germane to selected industry verticals.

Despite these niche CRM vendors' attempts to overcome these challenges, many will continue to struggle to avoid insolvency, while the luckier ones that have some attractive point solutions (e.g., partner relationship management (PRM) or portal solutions) that large enterprise vendors would still gladly incorporate will become acquisition targets. Although Xchange might have held out longer than most of its peers after the dot-com bust, it is a crumb of comfort to its stranded customer base now. Its predicament has been only aggravated and expedited by the company's public nature, given that some of its privately-held competitors have not had to come out with an array of dismal results and thereby further feed investors' bad sentiment and pessimism.

Larger CRM vendors have, on their hand, been weathering the storm by relying on cross-selling broader CRM application suites to their existing and potential customers, involving also components such as Sales Force Automation (SFA), employee relationship management (ERM) or call centers. Marketing automation point solution providers have particularly fallen prey to pessimistic investors and diminishing global corporations' appetites for technology. They have taken the impact of the slowdown because of a more budding market yet to create the market awareness of its true value proposition, and because of the slower adoption of information technology in marketing departments. These applications will have also often been perceived either as luxury (a nice to have' but not show-stopping) applications in these days of anyone hardly having any customers at all, or, in cases of customers valuing the proposition, they might be much more inclined to obtain it as a part of a broader CRM suite (if not even from an ERP provider) rather than as a point solution. Thus, the need for providing a full, comprehensive CRM suite rather than an individual solution or a bundle of point solutions for each distinct CRM area remains firm, and will urge further CRM (and overall enterprise applications for that matter) market consolidation.

The seriousness of these narrow product footprint vendors' predicament might be well illustrated by the Applix' departure, given the vendor had a solid CRM product breadth and technology foundation, a good implementation track record with nearly 1,000 satisfied customers, and some notable endorsements from ERP vendors that have been remiss in delivering their own CRM (i.e., SSA GT and Geac Computers Corporation). Many pure-CRM players that cannot even come close to the above traits should do their own math and analyze the justification of their independent existence within the CRM battleground. Not surprisingly, marketing automation-only providers have long been falling away to the extent of only a few possibly also endangered remaining providers like Unica, Aprimo, MarketSwitch, and MarketSoft. PeopleSoft's acquisition of Annuncio (see PeopleSoft Annuncio-es Continuation Of Its Shopping Spree ), Kana and Broadbase merger (see The Mid-Market Is Consolidating, Lo And Behold ), Pivotal's recent acquisition of MarketFirst, DoubleClick's acquisition of Protagona, S1 Corporation's acquisition of Point Information Systems, Vignette Corporation's acquisition of DataSage, and Chordiant's acquisition of Prime Response all should indicate diminishing life expectancy of independent CRM point solutions providers.

Why has it been so difficult for CRM point solution providers to even find a white knight, which has not generally been the case with even ancient ERP products? With several generations of some ERP products being available over a long period of time, the product development costs have been spread among a large population of users. These annual service & maintenance fees thus represent a substantial portion of revenue for most ERP vendors, and even if the product has not been actively marketed any longer, that revenue stream is going to be attractive to someone, if not to the original developer. This large installed base also allows for a greater aggregated vendors' experience, resulting thereby in higher-quality tried-and-true products.

The untapped ERP market segments will have also benefited by vicariously learning from mistakes and failed ERP implementations in many commercial companies in the past. Additionally, many ERP systems are now componentized, which provides phased implementations in more manageable chunks (instead of a traditional 'big bang' approach) in addition to vendors' developed implementation methodologies that are based on bypassing the usual traps of past failures. Many ERP systems have meanwhile also been Internet-enabled, which also allows for a quicker and simpler implementation, because client machines do not have to be configured time and again. Consequently, a prospective customer also has a choice of either installing software on its own intranet or renting it via an application service provider (ASP). Further, the leading ERP vendors have incorporated CRM, SCM, e-procurement and business intelligence (analytic) modules by developing them in-house, by acquisition or through strategic partnerships with the best-of-breed vendors.

Both large customer base (i.e., recurring revenue) and incremental products enhancements will have favored ERP vendors' longevity in the market, which has not been the benefit of CRM weaklings. Many of them will not have gathered large enough client base to find an interested suitor to try to recuperate an immense investment given these products had to be developed on cutting-edge technologies from scratch, as seen in Xchange's case above. Still, the most likely benefactors from Xchange's sellout should be direct competitors like Unica, Chordiant, E.piphany, DoubleClick, SAS, and NCR Teradata. These vendors either have enough resources and/or they have open solutions that can either supplant or can be grafted onto Xchange customers' instances. Some of them have apparently even already migrated some chunks of customer base and will be going after the remaining installed base with much zeal, while most of them have a more attuned product, more relevant customer references, and more dedication to marketing automation than large CRM/ERP suite vendors. Still, the large suite providers like SAP, Siebel, Oracle or PeopleSoft will indirectly benefit by citing Xchange's case to point out the need for a single-source, viable provider.

Descartes Systems Group Makes D&T Growth List 0 comments

Deloitte & Touche ranked Toronto-based Descartes Systems Group, Inc. number 21 on their list of 50 fastest growing Canadian technology companies. Descartes obtained their position on the list because of their 1247% increase in revenues since 1994.

Descartes' growth has rocketed over the last five years, fueled largely by a buying spree that has resulted in five major acquisitions since 1997. At an average price of over $10 million USD, these purchases have enabled Descartes to expand its Supply Chain Execution (SCE) product suite, increase its overseas presence, and broaden its vertical product market focus.

Company Name	Acquisition Cost	Date	Business
Michael Mead & Associates, Inc.	$13.2 million	2/97	Distribution software for bakery and other food industries
Roadshow International, Inc.	$29.9 million	11/97	Vehicle routing and scheduling software
Lightstone Group Inc.	$11.4 million	6/98	Software for delivery of goods and services
Calixon BV	$7.4 million	6/98	Trading partner collaboration, order tracking software
NRM	$1.4 million	7/98	Warehouse optimization software and consulting

For instance, the acquisition of Dutch software maker Calixon helped quadruple Descartes' revenue in Europe from 1998 to 1999. Its largest acquisition, Virginia-based Roadshow International, in addition to bolstering Descartes' logistics scheduling capabilities, brought a large customer base (over 600) into the fold. The MMA and Lightstone Group acquisitions gave the company added expertise in two additional verticals: baked goods distribution and delivery of goods and services. Managed effectively, these acquisitions can propel Descartes into the lead position among SCE vendors, displacing larger players Industri-Matematik, Manhattan Associates, and EXE Technologies. However, rapid growth can place a significant strain on a company's management and operations. Evidence of this can be seen in Descartes' negative profits for the last ten quarters, a timeframe that coincides with the acquisitions. While it is not uncommon for company balance sheets to dip into the red during periods of growth, continued losses can erode Descartes' financial foundation, impairing its ability to serve its customers.