InformationWeek
Defining The Business Value Of Technology
March 1, 1999
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OnCommand Inc., which pipes movies and other content into more than 15,000 hotel rooms around the world, opted for front office applications from Oracle, which typically sells to customers with revenue larger than OnCommand's $350 million. The company felt it needed the power of a larger application that could integrate all parts of the business--not only sales, marketing, and service, but also financial and other back-end units.
But OnCommand got plenty of concessions from the vendor: Oracle had to price its software more attractively for the midsize business, and it had to show that it could quickly respond to OnCommand's needs. "One of the things that we were looking at, and we were pleased to find, was that level of responsiveness," says Mike Perry, OnCommand's director of operational accounting. "We thought that as a large vendor they would have been more bureaucratic."
Moving Upmarket
Products traditionally focused on very small businesses have started to make their way upmarket, too. While Goldmine Software Inc., the reigning small-business customer-relationship management leader, is traditionally associated with under-$100 million businesses, it continues to expand its features, making it more suitable as companies scale. Administaff Inc., which acts as an off-site HR department for small companies, has used Goldmine since 1995. "As we have grown, our needs for the product have grown. Goldmine provides us the new features almost as we need them," says Lori Haynes, sales automation manager of Administaff. Goldmine, which offers sales and marketing modules, is planning on adding a customer-service component later this year.
Other companies are moving into the area Goldmine is vacating. Multiactive Software Inc., for instance, has added enterprise sales-force automation features to its Maximizer contact-management product, selling it as Maximizer Enterprise. Although the vendor has added traditional sales-force automation capabilities to the product, it has also added E-commerce capabilities that expand the definition of customer-relationship management.
Knowledge Media Inc., a 10-person company that develops technology and business content for companies and news outlets, is using Maximizer to link its contact management information with an E-commerce catalog on the Web. That simplifies its efforts to contact customers and for those customers to examine its wares.
"Our challenge is that because we're smaller and we don't have marketing budgets, we have to make ourselves visible. We have to get our message out in ways that are more compelling than larger companies," says Harry Gefen, creative director for the Toronto company.
But perhaps the most solid choices for most emerging enterprises remain the vendors that have always targeted them: Moss Micro, Onyx, Pivotal, Sales Logic, and Saratoga. Bottomline Technologies Inc., a $30 million company that helps companies move from paper payment systems to electronic ones, used Pivotal's Relationship suite to bring order and wide-scale efficiency to a fast-growing company that's just beginning to think of itself as an emerging enterprise. "Every time we would turn around, there would be a new department opening up or new projects happening," says Matt Kramer, Bottomline's director of corporate information.
Close customer relationships are critical for emerging enterprises, but not just any customer-relationship management product will do. More and more, small and midsize businesses are able to find software that's tailored to fit their very specific--and demanding--needs in this market.
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