Start-up front office application vendor, Octane Software Inc, today unveils its first customer relationship management (CRM) application suite, Octane 99, offering sales, marketing and service functionality. The San Mateo, California-based company launched itself onto the market in February, led by a team of former Siebel and Scopus (now Siebel) executives and with the backing of high-tech investors Greylock, Sigma Partners and Lucent Venture Partners. The company’s software is aimed exclusively at what it calls the Digital 1000 companies who are increasingly becoming web-focused.
According to the company’s CEO Tim Guleri, one of the key selling points of Octane 99 is that it’s the first packaged application to enable users to access the company by multiple entry points, including email, web, fax and phone. Other software vendors typically offer just one entry channel, Guleri says, which means that businesses have to add point solutions if they want to offer more options. The nature of customers is to come at a business whichever way they want, Guleri said, …so the onus is on the company to be very personalized and efficient.
In addition, he says users’ records are updated whichever channel they access the company through, so a person can make a call in the morning and follow it up with a web-based inquiry later that day and the system will automatically know about the previous contact. Another big plus point is the inclusion of a packaged datamart, called Octane Studio (based on Microsoft’s Plato technology) and business intelligence tools. According to Guleri, most companies keep their customer information in huge datawarehouses but the information is static, it’s not actionable, he says. Companies can run reports based on the data but there’s no real-time feedback of customer information, which is how organizations can improve and personalize their service, says Guleri. The idea behind Octane Business Warehouse is that it provides real-time analysis of customer information, which gets fed back into the system on the fly to provide, for example, differential customer service.
For instance, if a trading system goes down, the company can go to the business process and change it such that all the gold traders are simultaneously given free trades for the day to make up for the outage. In rival software, the company would have to go to each trader and update his or her file manually, Guleri said. As well as sophisticated on-the-fly analysis and feedback, the Octane business intelligence module also features 25 pre- packaged reports that enable businesses to analyze such things as how many calls there were in a week, how many emails, response time to users’ queries and so on. Octane 99 application server costs $25,000, each user license costs $2,500 and each entry channel costs $20,000. But users wanting email, web, fax and phone access can purchase an all-in-one license for $50,000. Octane says its prices are 30% less than rivals’ (Silknet, Siebel, Vantive) equivalents and the company also aims to drive down implementation costs, from today’s average of around six times license cost, to just double that.
