Formed in April, Berkeley offers its TeleWeb telephony, SalesWeb sales-force automation, MarketWeb marketing, and IntelliWeb integration services. Pricing is based on a fixed fee or a time-and-materials model, depending on a client's requirements.

Berkeley focuses its integration efforts on the front end, where users interface with their company's technology, says Howard Berg, Berkeley's president and co-founder. Front-office automation is an area of professional services that Gartner Group forecasts will grow to $2.9 billion by 2002. Insight Technology Group, however, reports that nearly 70% of front-office automation projects fail because the technology used to enable them is not sufficiently integrated with a company's back-end systems, which include enterprise resource planning and business-intelligence systems.

Analog Devices Inc., a Norwood, Mass., developer and manufacturer of high-performance analog and digital-signal processing components, such as integrated circuits, has used Berkeley's services to help Analog interact with customers on a real-time basis and through the appropriate sales channels. "Berkeley is helping us with this requirement and has the right approach to maximizing the effectiveness and quality of our customer interactions," says Goodloe Suttler, corporate VP of marketing, quality, and planning for Analog Devices.

For large companies to implement technology that lets them capitalize on all varieties of communication, Berg says, they need to focus on customer-contact centers, which are essentially call centers supplemented by Web technology, sales-force and marketing automation, business intelligence, and data warehousing.