Big Three Link For Crm Push

Sydney Morning Herald

Tuesday February 9, 1999

DAVID BRAUE

The client service sector beware, warns DAVID BRAUE , for here come Microsoft, KPMG and Compaq.

MICROSOFT has forged a partnership with KPMG Information Solutions (KPMGIS) and Compaq to barge its way into the booming enterprise customer relationship management (CRM) market.

CRM technology, which attempts to improve the customer experience at each contact point, is one of a number of markets experiencing growth as corporations refocus on strategy following the completion of Y2K remediation.

The three-way partnership announced last week will see Microsoft and Compaq combine forces with KPMGIS to support implementations of the Aurum FrontOffice CRM system, a well-reviewed customer management suite that combines sales force automation and call centre functionality.

Built using Visual Basic, Aurum tightly integrates with Microsoft applications such as Internet Explorer, Outlook, SQL and Server.

KPMGIS has been distributing Aurum for about nine months - its first customers included Western Australia's Western Power - but will now promote Microsoft and Compaq as its preferred suppliers of software (specifically, Windows NT) and hardware (Compaq's NT servers).

KPMG's associate director, Dino Gelmetti, says the result will be a more integrated, proven and complete solution for the swelling numbers of companies hoping CRM will help them convince customers to come back time and again.

"Most organisations have been focused on their back-office operations, implementing [enterprise resource planning] and trying to take care of their Y2K issues," says Gelmetti. "We're getting to the point where these activities are starting to wind down, and corporates are now looking at the customer interface - and how [CRM] can provide better customer service and make their sales force more productive. The whole idea is to provide corporates with a holistic view of any customer, so the left hand knows what the right hand is doing. We believe CRM is the new wave of IT solution coming through, and its benefits to organisations can be measured in dollars and cents."

Microsoft will ultimately benefit most from this alliance, however, as the participation of KPMGIS provides a strong endorsement that Windows NT is a suitable enterprise operating platform - an idea that Microsoft desperately wants to bolster in the long lead-up to the launch of the next version of Windows NT, called Windows 2000.

"This alliance is a ringing endorsement of the efficacy of our platform for the enterprise," says Graeme Moon, national alliance manager with Microsoft Australia. "We fully acknowledge that this hasn't always been the case, and we also acknowledge that we haven't dealt with the partners that deal in this sort of enterprise space. But we as Microsoft are involved in accounts where we believe KPMG can value-add, so our approach is to team with them and ensure that there are enterprise lines of business applications that we can jointly engage [customers] on."

Indeed, Moon adds, Microsoft has been working hard with the other four members of the Big Five consulting firms to increase their perception of NT as stable and powerful enough to meet the needs of large enterprise customers.

Having won the endorsement of the world's largest consulting houses, Microsoft will reap the rewards of partnerships in specific software markets by extending the penetration of NT into mission-critical applications such as CRM.

This strategy is already succeeding in the ERP market, with a sizeable and growing proportion of SAP R/3 implementations now being based on NT instead of the Unix platforms that have so long been the enterprise platform of choice.