Boston-based start-up, Berkeley Enterprise Partners, has become the latest vendor to cash in on the booming customer relationship management market, this time focusing on integration services. The company says its business is built around the premise that not one vendor currently offers a complete CRM suite, thereby forcing customers to piece together their CRM strategies from multiple vendors.
President Howard Burg, former VP of CRM for Compaq Computer Corp, cites research which shows that all companies realize the benefits of CRM software, but of those that have begun to implement offerings, 69% say the roll-outs have been unsuccessful.
We’ve got a situation where the front office transition is mandatory, the software solutions are all there but there’s a huge implementation failure rate, Burg said. The main reason for this anomaly, he says, is that companies don’t have a coherent strategy based on fundamental business processes from the very beginning.
To address that problem, Burg says Berkeley has come up with a new business architecture which addresses the four key components of a company’s CRM strategy: customer contact centers, sales force automation, marketing automation and business intelligence. The architecture isn’t defined technologically, rather it is a consultative process which works by helping companies define their key business processes and the matching those with best of breed software.
Systems integration is becoming an increasingly hot issue in the CRM space. As well as multiple application vendors, from start- ups like Octane Software to ERP giants like SAP and Oracle, there are an equal number of integrators and consultants all itching to get a piece of the CRM pie. At last month’s Gartner Group user conference in Florida, analysts warned that the systems integration component of a company’s CRM strategy typically costs one and a half to two times as much as the cost of the applications themselves. While many vendors claim to overcome the systems integration problem by offering an end-to-end CRM suite, none is yet actually doing so, the analysts said.
Berkeley, which currently has 10 employees, was formed in April of this year and received its first round of funding from venture capital firm Trident Capital. Burg says the plan is to expand its numbers to 25 employees by the end of the year and at the same time close its second round of funding. Throughout 2000, the company hopes to grow to 100 staff with plans to go public some time after that. In the interim it’s working hard to partner with front office vendors. The company already has co-marketing agreements with eCredit.com (an on-line credit services company) and MarketSoft, which makes lead management software, and Burg says reselling agreements could follow.
