E.Piphany 6.5 Software Suite Provides Customer Information Backbone
On October 27, E.piphany announced the release of the E.piphany 6.5 software suite and scheduled its general availability for November 14, 2003. Featuring its robust J2EE service-oriented architectural "backbone" in this release, E.piphany has added functionality to all components of the suite. Most notable are the new cross-functional components, blending marketing functionality into sales and sales into service.
Leveraging its maturing service-oriented architecture, called the customer relationship backbone (CRB), E.piphany has established a valuable customer intelligence keystone. It opens connectivity across the customer interaction spectrum, and provides its own and other operational CRM applications with a cross-functional demand chain platform to drive performance management.
Assessment
The E.piphany 6.5 software suite includes new functionality across all components of the suite, including sales, marketing, and contact center. The sales solution has been extended to include a new E.piphany Telesales solution, offering blended marketing and sales functionality that combines campaign management features with a new sales desktop for outbound telesales agents. Bowing to the latest privacy protection rules, the new module includes compliance with the latest do-not-call regulations. The E.piphany contact center has added support for blended service and sales contact centers, providing lead management and other sales functionality in addition to customer service and support features. Marketing functionality has been enhanced with E.piphany Event-Driven Marketing, designed to drive optimal interactions with customers triggered by various events in the customer lifecycle.
With the 6.5 software suite, E.piphany is also releasing results of high-volume scalability benchmarks performed with IBM, including a 5,000-seat test of E.piphany Sales and Service software products. At the same time, E.piphany has deepened its support for IBM DB2 Universal Database, Enterprise Server Edition Version 8.
From a performance management perspective across the demand chain, Ventana Research is most excited about features embodied in and leveraged from the E.piphany Customer Relationship Backbone (CRB). This solution platform, first introduced with last year's E.6 release, leverages a J2EE service-oriented architecture. The data integration capabilities in the CRB allow CRM applications to obtain a single, consistent view of all customer information, whether from a local database or remote systems, inside E.piphany CRM applications, other vendor storage platform, or elsewhere in the enterprise. Defining a virtual data model in the CRB, it maps the virtual objects to their physical storage locations.
According to E.piphany, the CRB provides the necessary services to unify customer processes, customer intelligence, and customer data across CRM and other front-office and customer-facing intelligence. Each of the individual services within the CRB is an Enterprise Java Bean (EJB) with a well-defined service and associated Web service interface. This simplifies integration with other J2EE applications, or with other applications capable of invoking Web services, thus enabling E.piphany application connectivity to the many other applications that make up the total customer relationship landscape.
Another less-touted feature of this architecture is its alignment with infrastructure vendors in supporting a set of standards that enable linking of individual services into useful business processes, such as Web Services Business Process Execution Language (WSBPEL). All CRM applications are able to take advantage of the new business process standards for application-to-application integration, but only those using a service-oriented architecture on a standard application server will be able to take advantage of these process definition standards within the CRM application itself.
Market Impact
Over the recent past, E.piphany has struggled to maintain visibility and momentum in its core CRM market niche. Tough market challenges and recent changes in top management continue to affect the company's ability to further its market position while working through its own customer relationship processes.
In a soft market for CRM applications, larger vendors PeopleSoft and Siebel, plus Oracle and SAP to a lesser extent, have squeezed E.piphany in terms of operational functionality and application performance, as well as market presence. On the marketing application front in particular, SAS and a few other marketing-focused vendors such as Kana and Unica have gained traction where E.piphany once dominated. Finally, small predictive modeling niche vendors such as KXEN, up-and-comer InfoCentricity, Fair-Isaac, and ThinkAnalytics, continue to chip away at share of the predictive modeling that is pursued by the more analytically advanced organizations. Ventana Research believes that none of this is likely to change significantly in the short term, at least not directly as a result of the E.piphany 6.5 software suite release. On the other hand, as all of these vendors move to deploy their applications on robust service-oriented architectures, we see the market shifting away from strictly operational CRM functionality and focusing more and more on supporting broader customer intelligence initiatives. Featuring its CRB architecture, E.piphany drives a stake in this ground, positioning itself for the future.
Recommendation
Ventana Research believes the customer relationship mandate is broadening. New cross-functional, process-driven customer intelligence standards are emerging. In this context, we advise any customer-driven organization to revisit its customer initiatives, to assess how well your organization is performing vis-à-vis these objectives, and align to the broader customer intelligence issues beyond the operational requirements of your CRM applications. Current E.piphany customers should be predisposed to carefully assess the new offerings, especially if an upgrade decision was deferred at the time of the E.6 release. Added cross-functional features and maturation of the backbone are reason enough to take a look. At the same time, challenge E.piphany to articulate migration issues and challenges in order to prepare your organization for the hurdles to be jumped.
For those organizations that have deployed other vendor platforms, there may be no compelling reason inside this E.6.5 release to switch to E.piphany. Even so, Ventana Research recommends that its differentiating architectural backbone be examined, and challenge current vendors to articulate plans for SOA and business process standards compliance and the blended functionality it can bring.
