From the Top


 
From the Top
- Executive to Executive -

 
Hear why E.piphany's CEO has made a massive investment re-architecting their suite of CRM solutions and how they are focused on creating a consistent customer experience. All for ten percent of the cost of a Siebel implementation.

Roger Siboni, President and CEO, E.piphany


 
RealMarket: What’s new at E.piphany?
 
Siboni: We are rolling out our family of E.piphany Service 6 applications this month. This culminates a yearlong rollout of the E6 suite. It is the first and only end-to-end suite of applications that cover marketing, sales and services delivered on a fully J2EE based platform.
 
RealMarket: Presumably, your new solutions are in response to what you see as the market demand. What do the CEOs that you talk to see as the number one issue or opportunity facing CRM today?
 
Siboni: I think the number one opportunity is the ability to create a continuous customer experience where the enterprise maintains a single view of the customer. Creating great product and great service over the lifetime of the customer across all touch points is what people want.
 
RealMarket: Re-architecting an entire product line is a major undertaking. What prompted E.piphany to make this type of investment?
 
Siboni: There has been quite a bit of disappointment in CRM that has centered on over-promised results. Project costs have been three to ten times original expectations mostly because of integration costs. The under-performance and under-delivery of CRM is in part due to the inadequacies of the technologies. Typical CRM solution providers have silo solutions around sales, service and marketing. In addition, these applications are developed around a proprietary view of what is a customer. Because of that, the systems have been very monolithic and closed.
 
Applications come out of the box a particular way. That’s all well and good and people want solutions that work out of the box, but you are stuck with those business processes. When you want to tailor your solution to fit your business processes, you need the right platform. In the past, we have probably invested ahead of revenue but the J2EE investment is the right investment. In retrospective, I wish we had moved more aggressively to a J2EE platform. I wish we had the platform we have today at the height of the bubble.
"Do you want a solution that is costly to implement and hard to configure or do you want a very open, very configurable standard’s based solution? The choice is clear."

 
RealMarket: You claim that E.piphany is the only end-to-end CRM solution based on J2EE. What makes you think you’ve got it right this time?
 
Siboni: We were born a decade after many of the other CRM solution providers. We are excited about our J2EE launch because it is based on industry standards. Companies don’t have to build around a proprietary standard like Siebel. The second advantage is the J2EE backbone allows us to offer solutions that are delivered in components. The components are configurable so they can conform to the business processes of an enterprise.
 
RealMarket: In a crowded market, how does E.piphany differentiate itself?
 
Siboni: There is an absolute clear differentiator in terms of architecture. Do you want a solution that is costly to implement and hard to configure or do you want a very open, very configurable standard’s based solution? The choice is clear. We offer tremendous integration opportunities at one-tenth the competition. Deployment costs are a fraction of what it would take with other solutions. More importantly, the continuing cost advantage of easy solution adaptation is quite compelling since most organizations continually fine-tune their business processes to match changing customer demands.
 
We have rich analytics that differentiate us. That allows our customer to measure and act. For example, we have a real-time recommendation engine. The software in a call center allows the agent to get a real-time screen pop that lets them understand who the customer is, what the experience has been, and what that customer is doing at that moment. That engine creates scripts, dialogs and recommendations to enhance what the customer already owns. When the recommendation is relevant, customer acceptance rates soar. Meaningful uplifts of 15% - 45% can make a dramatic impact on the bottom line.
 
RealMarket: While E.piphany has a broad range of applications, many analysts believe that no one vendor can provide an entire CRM solution set. Do you agree?
 
Siboni: CRM is very vast and no one vendor will offer everything. But the major components that are generally viewed as marketing, sales and service are delivered in the E.piphany suite. So while not everything will come from one vendor, all of the primary CRM functions can and will be single sourced.
 
RealMarket: What about the ERP solution providers that now offer CRM?
 
Siboni: Some analysts believe that only the ERP vendors will win. I think that is clearly a naive view. The ERP vendors are re-trenching. Oracle is not much of a factor in CRM. Peoplesoft has demonstrated limited execution to date. SAP is on round four of their applications.
 
RealMarket: So is Siebel your primary competitor?
 
 
Siboni: Siebel is the number one competitor - clearly. That is true now more than ever. First, there were the legacy vendors -Clarify, Vantive and Siebel. Clarify was first purchased by Nortel and then by AmDocs which has focused solely on telecommunications. Peoplesoft acquired Vantive and they have completely re-written the application. That leaves Siebel. Years ago we had hundreds of newly minted companies that labeled themselves as CRM. With the exception of E.piphany, the newly minted companies are now out of capital without having established market momentum or a significant installed base. So it has pretty much whittled down to Siebel and us.
 
"It is compelling to say that our solutions are one-tenth the cost of Siebel’s. Equally compelling is the ability to deliver configurable solutions around a company’s business model - especially around call center processes and sales processes."

 
 
RealMarket: What is your strategy to successfully compete with the market leader?
 
Siboni: There are three ways we go after them. It is compelling to say that our solutions are one-tenth the cost of Siebel’s. Equally compelling is the ability to deliver configurable solutions around a company’s business model - especially around call center processes and sales processes. Call centers and sales forces are constantly changing their business process to tune to their customer demands. The systems that support those business functions need to change as well and we are better suited at easily adapting to change. Thirdly, because our solutions are delivered on an integrated platform we can offer a consistent customer experience. For example, we are very pleased with the multi-channel capabilities and that is an area of differentiation. Siebel is competent in agent-based call centers but very empty around web self-service. There are specialists focused exclusively on web self-service. We offer all channels - telephone, web, email, chat, etc.
 
Siebel says they are the market leader and the safe choice. That is starting to ring a bit hallow with Siebel’s recently documented weaknesses. It is getting easier to defeat. They will talk about functionality and applications around specific vertical industries. That plays well for the first meeting but when you dig deeper you find that system rigidity and lack of configurability doesn’t allow them to create applications that can adapt across vertical industries.
 
RealMarket: Recently E.piphany announced a new relationship with IBM. Tell us more about the relationship.
 
Siboni: We really believe that J2EE will be the corporate architecture investment for the future because it offers the ability to drive component applications. IBM is betting the company around J2EE and working it into its technologies. It’s all about driving the J2EE standard.
 
RealMarket: What about .NET?
 
Siboni: We are building component applications that can be layered on either .NET or J2EE. My hope is that the two can find a way to merge. It would make my life easier. That not happening, we will build for both.
 
"I think the biggest change that people will be tackling is real integration of sales, service and marketing. Taking the functionality, knowledge and analytics in today’s silos to meet the customer’s needs and derive insight will unlock corporate value."

 
 
RealMarket: Tell me more about E.piphany’s roadmap to providing better ROI and a more complete solution offering.
 
Siboni: We are asking questions like does it drive revenue, retention and repeat business. Each application we build, we build with those questions in mind. Clearly, there are cost advantages with the E6 technology but the applications we are delivering offer great customer success and great ROI. We have an ROI czar in the company working with our customers to better understand the ROI and how to incorporate that into future products.
 
RealMarket: Looking to the future, what is the biggest change you see on the CRM horizon?
 
Siboni: I think the biggest change that people will be tackling is real integration of sales, service and marketing. Taking the functionality, knowledge and analytics in today’s silos to meet the customer’s needs and derive insight will unlock corporate value. People talk about marketing as the next big wave. What they are talking about is marketing spreading across the entire enterprise. For that to happen, the silos have to come down.
 
Front and back-office sounds good and that might come to pass some day. It is unlikely that one vendor will be able to do it all. When it does happen it will be delivered by standards. But until we knock down the CRM silos it is overly optimistic to think that everything can be integrated today.
 
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