One of the newest buzzwords floating around the IT mindspace is enterprise relationship management (ERM). A strong contender in this young field is the "Business in a Box" solution, developed and marketed around the world by US-based Emerging Technology Solutions (ETS).
Renowned for its range of "In a Box" solutions targeting different key aspects of business, such as human resources, help desks and customer service, ETS has partnered locally with Centurion-based solutions provider ITI Technology Holdings, to open ETS South Africa, headed up by Andries Coetzee.
Business in a Box is an ERM solution comprising 23 different applications, and as ETS president Bud Brasier explains: "It`s a comprehensive set of business applications that can then integrate into other aspects of business - the financial system, the enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, or any other legacy system the company might already have in place."
Business success
"ERM is a new buzzword to the South African marketplace. In the States, ERM has been around for about a year-and-a-half to two years now. Most people have heard about customer relationship management (CRM). That is a subset of ERM, which really focuses on all of the relationships that are necessary to make a business successful - not just your customers, although they`re critical to your business success - but also your employees, suppliers, business partners. It addresses all those areas of the market sector."
Business in a Box was initially released in 1995, and has been rewritten four times. "As technology has improved, we`ve taken advantage of that and also improved the product and its capabilities," says Brasier. "The original project took five developers nine months to complete. One of the most comprehensive aspects of this development was defining the requirements of what the product should do. That probably took three months."
As it is such a relatively new business sector, there is no confirmed market leader. "ETS has performed a marketing analysis survey, which is being used as a confidential strategic business tool. From the results, ETS is developing a White Paper on ERM, which will be available within two weeks.
"The market segment is well defined. Our research utilised 10 different sources of information to document the ERM market space, which is considered the fastest growing market segment in the entire IT industry. It`s growing at an average of 45% a year, with an estimate of being worth $7.6 billion - and that`s just the software.
"I don`t think I could classify ETS as the leader; we definitely don`t have the market share to make that statement. However, no one else really has the market share either - right now the market`s wide open. Up until recently, no one had more than 10% market share. That was until Siebel acquired a company called Scopus. They each had 9% market share, and now have a combined 18%. There`s a lot of consolidation going on around the ERM space because it is such a hot market.
"PeopleSoft just bought Vantive, for example, for $443 million. Nortel just bought Clarify for $2.1 billion. Clarify only had a turnover last year of $160 million. Everyone wants into this space; companies that have products in the ERM space are extremely attractive right now."
Commenting on the advantages to partnering with ITI, Brasier says: "They`ve given us the opportunity to have much more depth in resources, and access to other products that complement ours and add to a total solution."
Brasier believes the ERM market doesn`t compete against the ERP market, but instead augments it. "They say that ERP is designed to move `stuff`, into and out of your business. ERM is designed to manage people, and the relationships that go with them. You need both - you need the `stuff` and you need the people in order to have a successful business.
ERP growth
"The ERP market is very well defined - we all know the major players: SAP, Baan, PeopleSoft, Oracle, JD Edwards. I wouldn`t say that the market is shrinking, but I do think that the growth rate is tapering off. The reason for that, I think, is that it`s reaching saturation point. Those companies that can afford a multi-million dollar ERP system have pretty much already done that."
ETS` solutions have traditionally operated off Lotus Domino and Lotus Notes platforms. But Brasier confirms that there are plans in the pipeline to render ETS products technology-independent.
"We`ll continue with the `in a box` line of products. However, another line of product is being developed as we speak, that will be a 100% Java-fronted, backend database-independent, and we`re building our own workflow engine that will be released in the second quarter of the year 2000."
With a client list featuring the likes of Johnson & Johnson, MCI, the State of North Dakota, Federal Express and Global Telecommunications in Kuwait, ETS` clients` main concerns regarding the implementation of ERM have generally been the smooth integration of Business in a Box into legacy systems.
As Brasier explains: "Tying all the data systems together to provide one useful information set is a comprehensive task. Ourselves, ETS, and our business partners in 28 countries around the world are well trained at doing that integration, but that is definitely the most complex (depending on their legacy systems)."
Growing industry
As to the future of ERM, Brasier believes the industry will continue to grow. "The biggest element right now is education; we need to help educate customers about what they can do with ERM-based solutions.
"A small example is our Kuwaiti customer, Global Telecommunications. They were the sole cellular service provider for all of Kuwait. They had 400 000 customers. They would receive 8 000 customer calls each day, and typically dropped 60% of all of those calls.
"With the solution that we`re implementing for them, their drop rate has now gone to 2%. They`re answering virtually all of the customer calls, but they haven`t increased their head count at all. So they`ve made significant increase in productivity and customer service.
"What drove them to do that was that the Kuwaiti government opened up competition and allowed another cellular service provider to come into the country. Thus I believe that competition is a wonderful thing. It causes all of us to work a little harder. So I think the market will continue to grow and improve as people see the benefits of effectively managing their customers, employees, suppliers and partners.
"One of our objectives is to become recognised as one of the ERM experts in the industry. That`s why we`re writing white papers, and publishing numerous documents, and holding numerous speaking engagements. We believe that the ERM segment is extremely strong and we want to be recognised as one of the expert providers."
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