Business growth depends to a large extent on acquiring, retaining and extending relationships with customers. The systematic management of these relationships has become a competitive necessity and represents the only truly sustainable competitive advantage in today`s markets.
"In an increasingly dynamic and global market, any advantage based on product or service innovation is short-lived," says Pieter Naudé, managing director of SPL. "Forging long-term relationships with customers is key to stability and competitive edge. The need to retain and grow customers, while acquiring new ones, has never been greater and investment in customer relationship management is fast becoming a key performance indicator for global businesses as we approach the new millennium."
SPL, part of JSE-listed Dimension Data, is investing heavily to position itself as the dominant player in the provision of total customer relationship management solutions in South Africa. As part of this drive, the company has forged a strategic partnership with Siebel Enterprise Systems, the leader in world-class Enterprise Relationship Management applications.
"As management attention turns to front-office re-engineering, and as processes in the front office and beyond the corporate perimeter are re-worked, tools which can automate the resulting processes have become vital," says Naudé. "We aim to compete aggressively in this front-office arena.
"Siebel has the most successful offering in the sales and servicing areas of the Customer Management spectrum to date," he says. "The company is a leading provider of object-oriented, enterprise-class sales information systems.
"Siebel`s position as a market leader has been acknowledged by recognised industry experts, including the Aberdeen Group, Gartner Group and Ovum Ltd. Its applications are designed to offer users a sales, marketing, and customer service information solution that is functionally comprehensive, built upon a modern technology foundation, and scales to meet the requirements of global organisations with thousands of concurrent users and very large data stores."
This focus on customer management is a result of a major repositioning by SPL, which has long been recognised as a high value IT partner to South African corporations and government. Customer management is now one of three major focus areas for the new look SPL.
"Essentially we have drawn together and focused our existing skills, products and technologies into areas of demand, growth and high business value," says Naudé "We have consolidated the various software products business units to more accurately reflect the focus areas of our business.
"Our aim is to ensure SPL is a company that is innovative in its thinking, exciting to work for, highly experienced and has a passion to perform. We have the history of SPL as a positive legacy towards our credentials, and the dynamics of DiData, together with new opportunities such as our Siebel partnership, as our gateway to the future."
Apart from customer management, SPL`s other focus areas are information management and enterprise systems.
"Within information management, it is our task to help organisations discover the value inherent in their existing data and to transform it into useful information," says Naudé
"Our customers also need help in integrating applications and data sources into an information utility to facilitate information flow across diverse technologies and platforms. Services offered by this division include data warehousing, data mining, delivery tools, decision support services and workflow."
Long standing partner, Comshare, supported by new partners, MicroStrategy Inc, Prism Technologies, Tower Technology, StaffWare and JDA, will contribute significantly to SPL`s ability to deliver comprehensive information strategy solutions in support of better decision making.
Within the enterprise systems arena, SPL looks to continue assisting organisations to make effective use of information technology by improving the productivity, efficiency and cost of delivering and managing applications in the IT environment.
"We envisage becoming worthy partners for our customers by assisting them to become successful users of IT. Our contribution to the partnership includes the provision of high quality software, supporting skills and services," says Naudé
"We help our customers to integrate their applications, for example by transforming the distributed world of legacy applications, databases, networks and the Internet, into a component-based platform that will communicate and integrate with the new generation of e-commerce applications.
"We also offer applications engineering services, including tools and methodologies that deliver business applications across the spectrum of current and future platforms with the least risk, within the shortest time, to the highest standards of re-usability and maintainability."
The release by Software AG, long-standing SPL partner, of a new generation of tools and technologies in support of electronic-business applications for the enterprise, has attracted world-wide attention and gives SPL huge opportunity in this area. New partnerships have also been established with world-class vendors such as Intersolv and Computer Associates to strengthen SPL`s position as a leading player in enterprise systems.
SPL is a business unit within the Solutions Division of the Dimension Data Holdings Group, which also includes Dimension Data Business Solutions and Dimension Data Industry Solutions, formerly divisions within SPL.
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