CRM and ERP News

The growing acceptance of the SOA approach to enterprise applications has reopened an old I.T. wound: the sorry state of data in most enterprises. In the 1990s, the data warehouse and the enterprise repository were trumpeted as the solution for getting the entire enterprise on the same page, but these systems quickly became unwieldy dumping grounds, much like the cavernous Indiana Jones warehouse in which the Ark of the Covenant was stored to keep it safely out of reach.

Today, a new approach -- often labeled master data management -- is emerging, one that takes a modular, orchestration-based approach to rationalizing data strewn across the enterprise in various formats and repositories.

Similar to a complete SOA deployment, however, a complete master data management effort is a huge undertaking, one that takes years and consumes a lot of resources with marginal interim benefit. "You just can't shut down the enterprise and do this major business re-engineering," says Don DePalma, chief researcher at I.T. consultancy Common Sense Advisory. So what is I.T. to do?

Increasingly, companies are revisiting a mid-1990s approach -- the data mart, now often called a system of record -- that fell by the wayside during the data warehouse and repository crazes. Creating a system of record is a good way to start down the path of an enterprisewide master data management system. It helps I.T. get a handle on key data, making it more available to enterprise users and providing a demonstrable ROI in the process.

Data warehouses and enterprise repositories shunted aside the data mart of yore. In most cases, the data mart couldn't do the job of being a timely data container, DePalma says. "It was a snapshot, so it was outdated," he notes. But data marts can now be near-real-time repositories, thanks to a variety of advances in the...

As India moves more up-market in outsourcing, the Philippines is fast gaining a share of the customer-contact call center business. It might be low-end and low-margin, but for the Philippines it has been an employment boon. Evidence of that sharp growth is on display early in the evening in the lobby of the RCBC Plaza building in Makati City, as groups of prosperous-looking young men and women, Starbucks coffees and McDonald's bags in hand, head to work at more than a dozen call centers serving the United States, just as everyone else is heading home.

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Customer Relationship Management software, which is better known these days simply as CRM, can be beneficial to many parts of an enterprise, particularly by helping sales reps and service personnel track information about customers and prospects. But it's putting the pieces together, extending beyond the basic functionality and establishing connections from end-to-end throughout the enterprise that can really make for more powerful processes.

When it comes to CRM, many companies tend to focus on the front aspects of business, says Mark Woollen, vice president of CRM product strategy at Oracle. They invest in CRM for sales or customer support but don't tie the systems together with areas like fulfillment, product development, or vendor selection.

"Enterprises haven't wedded together the different aspects of CRM and found points to leverage the expertise in one department with that in another," says Woollen. However, more and more companies are seeing the light, Woollen notes. "People are beginning to look for that kind of integration, and stitch things together. They're understanding the value of end-to-end processes."

Staying a Step Ahead

An end-to-end strategy does more than bring together customer and product information, says Angela Bandlow, vice president of CRM solution marketing at SAP. That kind of strategy can also give companies a glimpse at the efficiency of their processes.

For example, if an order is placed, the CRM system can not only make sure the right product is in inventory, but also create a shipping record that can be given to the customer and also tied in to the supplier. A spike in demand might cause a supplier to change shipping schedules or notice buying trends based on industry or geography.

"There's a lot to think about, and a great deal that can be brought together," Bandlow says. "There are a breadth of processes that can be integrated."

Keeping Your Eye...

Salesforce.com made another announcement this week. This time they have announced a new integration facility that is based in part on the announced, but as yet undelivered, Apex programming language. Not to quibble, Salesforce has had a good year but it is slowly beginning to get into a futures game. The Apex language as well as the integration facility, ApexConnect, which was announced this week, are both scheduled to be introduced in the first quarter of 2007.

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Here's a good news for our readers. We are going to host the first edition of the "Carnival of Customer Service" on December 11, 2006. We require interesting blog posts on CRM, customer service, call center, business, marketing and other customer-related issues. Feel free to submit your entries through the Blog Carnival Page.

Salesforce.com on Monday introduced ApexConnect, a new family of integration tools that connect its on-demand customer relationship management solution with back-office systems. Features include ConnectOut, an on-demand outbound messaging application program interface; ConnectOracle, which integrates Salesforce with Oracle 11i; and a new ApexConnect category of integration partners on the AppExchange. Taken as a whole, ApexConnect will facilitate a range of integration tasks.

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Quick. When was the last time you remember being pleasantly surprised by how effectively a company used data about you to improve your customer experience?

We all remember back in the '90s the wow of going to an ATM and seeing our actual name on the screen for the first time. We all remember the first time we experienced collaborative filtering from an e-commerce site -- "if you liked this, you may also like..."

But lately it seems the corporate world's flattened out or fallen off the learning curve in leveraging the data it has about us -- as evidenced by the mountain of mostly off-target offers that bombards both our real and virtual mailboxes.

Personally, I'm amazed that none of the companies I've done business with for years -- banks, telephone companies, insurance, publishers, and so on -- has ever considered it worthwhile to have a real live intelligent customer service rep call me on the phone and just ask me what I want.

But there may be a reason for that, according to the latest Management Barometer survey from PricewaterhouseCoopers. The study basically found that corporate data isn't being converted into usable knowledge nearly as often or as effectively as it could be -- not for lack of available technology, but for lack of corporate willpower.

In the survey of more than 100 top corporate execs, 71 percent called the data in their company's information systems "potentially very valuable" -- and most of them said it would become even more valuable as a source of competitive advantage in the next year.

Unfortunately, only 43 percent said their company had been very effective in converting this data into usable knowledge, citing numerous issues, including data consistency, timeliness, accuracy, and so on.

Interestingly, when asked about the keys to unlocking their data's value, the No....

Grid storage and storage clusters -- are the terms interchangeable? They could be if you ask users and industry analysts who participated in several panels at Storage Networking World this week.

There was a lot of confusion at this show as to what makes up a storage grid and how it differs from a cluster.

"If I think of the two or three technologies that are known for the greatest amount of conjecture, disagreement and confusion, grids and grid storage would be right up there," said Simon Robinson, senior analyst for the 451 Group and moderator of the panel on grid infrastructure.

Paul Strong, a distinguished research scientist, has a storage grid installed at eBay in San Jose that consists of two petabytes of capacity. His grid grows by 75 data volumes and 10TB of storage per week.

"At eBay, we consider our grid to be the underlying storage fabric," said Strong. "The issues we have with the grid is its ability to scale and agility to change. Management of the grid is complicated and hard. We are looking to move away from managing bits, bytes and blocks of data, and deploying software, technology and standards that can manage the grid as a single entity."

To do so, Strong called for standards and software for managing storage grids. Matthew Brisse, technology strategist in the Office of the CTO at Dell, who presented on grid architectures at the show, agreed.

"We're not there yet," said Brisse, adding that much of the middleware software that manages the grid is not available.

"Grid-based storage is storage that has grid attributes associated with it, meaning an orchestration middleware layer with its own quality of service capabilities, a scheduling layer that distributes the tasks on the grid, and a set of business policies that manage the cluster...

A start-up in wireless sensor nets has unveiled products with a service-oriented architecture that makes a sensor net an extension of the enterprise IP backbone.

Arch Rock's new Primer Pack combines hardware and software to deploy a six-node sensor network, with a gateway to the enterprise net, in about an hour, according to company executives. Besides the physical link between the IEEE 802.15.4 wireless sensing net and Ethernet, the gateway creates logical links at the data level using Web services. That means a wide array of existing enterprise tools, from Microsoft Excel to SAP ERP applications can make a simple Web services call to the sensor stored on the Gateway.

All of the gateway's functions, including IP connectivity, sensor node management and configuration, Web serving, and data collection and processing are all directly available as Web services, says David Culler, co-founder and CTO of San Francisco-based Arch Rock. "With all this, our sensor network becomes a well-behaved, useful citizen on IP networks, including the Internet," he says.

SOA has important payoffs, and other vendors in the wireless-sensor market are factoring it into their products, says Sam Lucero, a senior analyst at ABI Research. "Sensicast, Tendril, and MeshNetics all stress the importance of web services/SOA in their approaches," he says. "I do think it's an important step for Arch Rock, and I think the general trend for this industry is toward enabling Web services."

There are two key benefits from SOA. "One, it simplifies development, and two, it allows for "pieces" of the underlying wireless sensor net to be directly interacted with by outside applications, without a lot of customized programming," Lucero says.

There are a host of vendors focusing on wireless sensor nets and machine-to-machine (dubbed M2M) communications. They're offering an almost bewildering range of processors, network protocols, radio frequencies,...

Two years ago, Angeli Boteros spoke English like an American teenager. A lifetime of watching American television and movies left her sentences peppered with the trademark phrases of American youth. Like many young Filipinos, Boteros, 26, is so steeped in American pop culture that on the phone, she could pass herself off as a girl from California. Over the past year, she has been doing exactly that. As a call center agent at GCom, Boteros helps customers half a world away with problems with their purchased products or services.

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