The enabling technology, called CDT (Consumer Dialog Technology), was designed for YaYa by Deloitte & Touche and uses middleware vendor Iona's Web services-based integration platform at its core.
"We think this is the missing piece of the CRM puzzle, using real time and enabling integration to build a persistent relationship with the customer," says James Clarke, COO of YaYa. This type of integration platform steps up the value proposition of CRM by giving users like Chrysler data in the moment, which they can turn around and leverage to try to make a sale.
Heeding the call from users for better CRM integration, CRM giant Siebel Systems in April unveiled plans for its UAN (Universal Application Network). This architecture is designed to take a standards-based, vendor-independent approach to the development of application-independent business processes that can be executed by various integration servers. The architecture would allow businesses to rapidly deploy prepackaged businesses processes but also modify processes on the fly with reduced need for customization, according to company officials. Siebel expects to roll UAN out this fall.
"The technical approach is to leverage the capabilities of the integration server vendors ... in conjunction with an approach of having a common data representation between applications that exist in the integration server platform," says Ed Abbo, senior vice president of technology at San Mateo, Calif.-based Siebel. "If you are adding another application to the application network, the job is simply to transform the data from that new application to the common data representation."
UAN is designed to allow organizations to deploy applications incrementally while leveraging existing applications in the infrastructure, Abbo adds.
"Siebel is trying to make its upgrades easier by working around standard XML, so if the source system changes, the specific business functions don't have to be changed," says Bernard Drost, vice president of technology at Akibia Consulting, a Westborough, Mass.-based company that specializes in CRM projects. Essentially, UAN cuts down on repeated manual coding for integration, he says.
As more and more ERP companies enter the CRM arena, some enterprises opt to tap SAP, PeopleSoft, or Oracle for customer-facing solutions to avoid the oftentimes lengthy and costly integration of CRM with back-end systems. Molex, a Chicago-based electronic interconnection device manufacturer, estimated it would cost $1.5 million in integration costs alone to put together a best-of-breed CRM solution for marketing fulfillment, pipeline management, and customer care, says Barry McGoldrick, Molex's director of global application development.
Instead the company, which runs a single instance of SAP worldwide, made ease of integration a deciding factor and turned to SAP for its CRM module, even though the best-of-breed option offered equal functionality, McGoldrick says. Other companies are opting for Web-based CRM models such as those from UpShot and Salesforce.com and leveraging Web services to ease some of the heavy overhead typically associated with integrating CRM behind a company firewall.
Frustrated users are realizing that integration holds the key to unlocking CRM's true potential to boost customer service and satisfaction, deliver more sophisticated sales offers, and cut enterprise costs. But the journey remains arduous, as the economy puts the brakes on IT spending and the options and approaches for solving the CRM integration problem are varied and complex. Some observers see hope in current vendor efforts, such as Siebel's UAN, and in the push for Web services, which are at least signs that the problem is being addressed.
"[CRM] integration is complex and difficult, and I think Web services will be another solid way to begin to move the problem toward a solution," notes Tyler McDaniel, integration analyst at Hurwitz Group in Framingham, Mass.
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