InformationWeek

February 15, 1999

Vendors Push Forward

Front-office, management apps breathe new life into push technology's offerings

By Jeff Sweat

Related links:

BackWeb Moves Into Front Office

And from our sister publications:

Computer Reseller News Play It Again: New, Improved Push Debuts

ush technology, once presumed dead, is being reborn. No longer just a way of distributing sports scores and horoscopes, push is reemerging as the foundation of a new breed of front-office and system-management applications that deliver timely information and software to business users.

Front-office applications vendor Vantive Corp. next month will launch Vantive Vista, a customer-relationship management product that integrates former push vendor Wayfarer Communications' push engine and data-aggregation technology with Vantive's customer-relationship management applications. BackWeb Technologies Inc. released its own customer-relationship management product, Sales Accelerator, in December; the vendor will add two new modules-campaign management and feedback-this spring. And Marimba Inc. next week will unveil Castanet 4.0, which tackles management services-tasks such as inventory control, asset management, financial portfolios, and subscriptions.

Vantive Vista will deliver to salespeople information garnered from multiple sources. Users and administrators can tailor the information for individual needs. For instance, a salesperson could be notified if the number of sales opportunities has dropped below a certain threshold, or have the system send product information on a particular item every time it's updated by the engineering group.

"With E-mail, we in IT have to decide what you get. It's an administrative nightmare," says Michael Roman, VP of business analysis at Everen Securities Inc., a Chicago brokerage firm and Vantive customer that is evaluating Vista. "Push is about putting the management of the data in the user's hand."

Vantive Vista, which can also deliver news headlines and competitive intelligence based on a user's job profile, acts as a single source of information. It offers basic analysis capabilities and lets users track customers by region, market, and product without having to launch a larger Vantive application. Users will be able to react to delivered information without leaving the environment.

Everen is interested in using Vantive Vista for distributing policies and procedures, research and market trends, and reports from its data warehouse, and linking the software to the company's other Vantive applications. Brokers, for instance, could be notified of customers who have placed calls into the call center and need help, while salespeople focused on one area, such as stocks, can stay aware of new products offered by the rest of the company.

Roman says Vantive Vista will free up salespeople to concentrate on customers. "You want your sales people doing just that: selling. You don't want them searching for information," he says.

Meanwhile, BackWeb's new campaign module will use workflow capabilities to walk a company through the sales and marketing campaign process, while the feedback mechanism brings two-way interaction to push communications, which has historically been only one-way. For example, if a company sends an offer to a customer, the customer could fill out a feedback form, send it in, and order the product immediately.

Sales Savvy
Softline GmbH, a German importer of software from more than 50 vendors, will use Sales Accelerator as the backbone for an extranet to push sales information to its 2,200 resellers. Softline CEO Peer Blumenschein says the company will use push to give resellers updates on product availability as well as accurate vendor material, such as presentations and white papers. When vendors make such information available, Sales Accelerator will automatically send it to those resellers that need it. "This lets us inform people in these companies of information that they should know about their business to stay competitive," he says.

Rite Aid Corp., the Camp Hill, Pa., pharmacy chain, uses BackWeb's flagship application platform, InfoCenter, to send merchandising bulletins and shelf plans to its stores. "This information touches every aspect of our business," says Paul Farrell, senior director of media technologies. "It's what they need to have on their shelves and ready to sell when the customer walks in."

That information previously would have been sandwiched in weekly mailings or E-mail, and perhaps never seen by the people who really need it. But the BackWeb software sends only relevant information, then pops a message up on an employee's screen that won't go away until it's been read.

Timely delivery of critical information could prove to be push's salvation. "No one has a push problem," says Alexis DePlanque, an analyst with the Meta Group. But companies do have problems delivering marketing and product information to sales representatives, notifying customers of important trans- actions, and distributing applications without human intervention. Now, push vendors are taking advantage of those needs and delivering applications that solve specific business problems. "They're addressing the pain points," says Allen Bonde, an analyst with the Extraprise Group.

The Quickest Response
Why push technology? It delivers information more quickly and cheaply than other alternatives. If E-mail is like sending a letter, the new push is like sending a letter by courier: It's fast, it's important, and it's difficult to ignore. Push requires little administration from IT departments because it's tailored to user profiles. And push can send all kinds of data, making it suitable for the underpinnings of business portals, software distribution, sales-force automation, and customer interaction.

Push and customer-relationship management are a particularly good fit, analysts say, in part because the latter area is growing so rapidly. Push lets companies create dynamic interaction with customers without the cost of full-contact service and sales reps. "It bridges the gap," Bonde says. "It's less static than pure self-service, and more efficient than full customer service." Push can speed up sales cycles, too, since one of the keys to selling and servicing is information.

While most front-office vendors focus on internal sales, service, and marketing, Diffusion Inc. is attempting to make interactions with customers more dynamic. The company's recently released Customer Relationship Management 3.0 sends messages to customers to notify them of changes in their accounts, transactions that have closed, and products that are coming in. Diffusion's push technology sends messages not only to desktops and Web browsers, but to telephones, pagers, and fax machines-any way the customer wants to receive it.

BankAmerica Corp. in Charlotte, N.C., uses the technology to serve its largest business customers in its cash-management business. The application notifies users if, for example, account levels fall below a threshold or of events that are about to happen-or were supposed to happen but didn't. "It's a way to cut through the clutter of all this data and give customers something that's intelligent and actionable," says Rick Leander, senior VP and managing director of enterprise strategies for BankAmerica. "It's mirroring what a really good human assistant would do if all they had to do was sit around and watch out for you."

Push can also be helpful in the area of software management and distribution, where the technology can be used to update information and software on users' PCs. That reduces manual intervention with desktops, one of the biggest components of ownership costs.

Marimba has taken that route with Castanet 4.0. "Now it's not just distribution-it's managing complexity," says co-founder and CEO Kim Polese. The upgrade will also support network directory services and client-side security certificates, and moves beyond software distribution to give administrators a level of control over their networks and desktops.

Corio Inc., a Redwood City, Calif., application service provider, uses Castanet to implement, manage, and update the PeopleSoft applications it hosts for small and midsize businesses. The company will use the inventory and desktop-management features of Castanet 4.0 to maintain its software on a customer's PC. Corio expects Castanet to cut administration costs by 15%.

"It's critical for us to be able to remotely control our little piece of the desktop," says Hasan Risvi, Corio's director of engineering. "With this, we can not only look at it, but prevent problems that can occur."

Marimba's transformation is just another sign of push technology's changing face. As Bonde says, "Successful push is usually called something else." Today's vendors are switching focus from trumpeting their technology to solving business problems.

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