“We intend to offer the modern-day CRM avatar”

Paul Beddie, director, sales, CRM solutions, Japan & APAC, PeopleSoft, spoke to VENKATESH GANESH

* PeopleSoft recently unveiled the Enterprise CRM 8.9 suite. What kind of upgrades have you incorporated in this release?

We felt that the current CRM solutions lacked the requisite skill-sets to address the needs of an enterprise. Prescriptive Analysis forms the core of this suite. The rationale behind Prescriptive Analysis is to move analytics from predicting customer behaviour to prescribing and then performing this prescribed action. Also, during our interactions with our customers, we deduced that they wanted more from their customer, employee and partner interactions. They wanted a more streamlined marketing campaign, an empowered sales force, and tighter service. With the new functionalities, we intend to offer the complete modern-day CRM avatar to an organisation. It offers 15 new products and three new industry solutions. Additionally, it focuses beyond addressing conventional issues (such as delivering new and enhanced functionality), and looks at core issues such as usability and integration. Apart from Prescriptive Analysis, other elements that have been included are modules related to Customer Portfolio Management (CPM), HelpDesk for HR, IT, sales, marketing and partner relationship management.

* Would these address compliance-related issues?

Basel II establishes a basic framework that ensures banks will have a risk management strategy in place by 2006 to ensure against direct or indirect loss resulting from inadequate or failed internal processes, people and systems, or from external events. The Basel Committee-made up of 10 countries-intends to finalise its standard by the end of this year, with implementation of the framework required by the end of 2006. We partner IBM to provide risk management software and an upgrade to IBM's supplier relationship management software to financial services. We will combine our enterprise financial management applications with IBM's risk and compliance initiatives to help financial institutions meet Basel II mandates. In addition, capabilities have been added from PeopleSoft's existing technologies, including case management, branch scripting and automated claims processing for customer support applications.

* Companies today talk about service-oriented architecture (SOA). Does PeopleSoft have a framework of that sort?

While SOA architecture is being touted today, we were among the first vendors to have an Internet-ready architecture. We are seeking to reduce enterprises' dependence on middleware for connecting their applications to other applications in their environment. [PeopleSoft says it does so by using its AppConnect integration technology.] The PeopleSoft pure Internet architecture enables companies to move business processes online to connect customers, suppliers, employees and partners. It provides a common business integration platform across all PeopleSoft product families. Also, at present, we are not breaking down applications into logical components so that they can be part of an enterprise's SOA. For example, a Metagroup study (conducted in 2003) revealed that PeopleSoft's total cost of ownership was 25 percent lower than Oracle's and 51 percent lower than SAP's. In an application ownership satisfaction report conducted by Forrester, we had 43 percent better experience than Oracle, 36 percent as compared to Siebel, and 8 percent when compared with SAP. Additionally, to reinforce our commitment to open source, all applications will be available on Linux by the end of this year.