Amdocs ClarifyCRM Marketing and Analytics Solutions

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1 Rochelle Shaw, Cynthia R. Lubrano Product Report 22 July 2003 Amdocs ClarifyCRM Marketing and Analytics Solutions Summary Amdocs acquisition of Xchange has significantly boosted its ClarifyCRM marketing and analytics line. The vendor now offers a more comprehensive solution for campaign management and customer analytics. Table of Contents Overview Analysis Pricing Competitors Strengths Limitations Recommended Gartner Research Insight List Of Tables Table 1: Overview: Amdocs ClarifyCRM Marketing and Analytics Solutions Table 2: Enhancements: Amdocs ClarifyCRM Marketing and Analytics Solutions Table 3: Features and Functions: Amdocs ClarifyCRM Marketing and Analytics Solutions Gartner Reproduction of this publication in any form without prior written permission is forbidden. The information contained herein has been obtained from sources believed to be reliable. Gartner disclaims all warranties as to the accuracy, completeness or adequacy of such information. Gartner shall have no liability for errors, omissions or inadequacies in the information contained herein or for interpretations thereof. The reader assumes sole responsibility for the selection of these materials to achieve its intended results. The opinions expressed herein are subject to change without notice.

2 Corporate Headquarters Amdocs ClarifyCRM Division 2570 Orchard Parkway San Jose, CA 95131, U.S.A. Tel: Fax: Internet: Overview Amdocs is a supplier of customer relationship management (CRM), billing and order management systems, primarily for the communications industry. The company has worldwide offices in North America (Canada, Mexico and U.S.), South America (Brazil), Asia/Pacific (Australia, China, Japan and Thailand) and Europe (Cypress, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Netherlands, Poland, Russia, Spain, Sweden, Turkey and U.K.). Amdocs products are used by wireline, wireless, broadband, electronic, mobile commerce and IP service companies. When Amdocs acquired Clarify in late 2001, it inherited its highly-regarded CRM suite. The ClarifyCRM Marketing and Analytics line is comprised of the ClarifyCRM Predictive Analytics, ClarifyCRM Campaign and ClarifyCRM Opportunity Advisor products. In June 2003, Amdocs released ClarifyCRM 12, an update with a Web-based focus, a new development environment for ClarifyCRM Web applications, and improvements to its Process Manager and Integration Gateway facilities. The ClarifyCRM 12 series consists of Service and Support, Sales and Ordering, and Marketing and Analytics product lines. Table 1: Overview: Amdocs ClarifyCRM Marketing and Analytics Solutions Product Name ClarifyCRM Predictive Analytics. ClarifyCRM Campaign. ClarifyCRM Opportunity Advisor. Current Version 12. Product Type Marketing/analytics component of CRM suite. Price (US$) Based on the number of concurrent users. Date Released June Target Markets While Amdocs does not brand by vertical, it offers bundled applications targeted to telco, high tech manufacturing and financial services industries. Table 2: Enhancements: Amdocs ClarifyCRM Marketing and Analytics Solutions Process Manager Provides online, visual processing monitoring through any ClarifyCRM desktop application. Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE) process execution engine for heightened performance and scalability. Flowcharting capabilities for process modeling. Drives user interface page display and scripts through model processing. 22 July

3 Table 2: Enhancements: Amdocs ClarifyCRM Marketing and Analytics Solutions Integration Gateway Customization Center Allows customers to define and publish ClarifyCRM events for use by third-party systems. Extends channels through Extensible Markup Language (XML) response delivery to mobile device gateways. Supports asynchronous and synchronous integration using Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) technology, Java Message Service (JMS) and Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). Supports business-to-business integrations through Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP)/Web services. A new development environment for creating ClarifyCRM Web client applications and data models. Offers what you see is what you get (WYSIWYG) editing of user interface page layout and controls. Uses wizards to speed customization of existing business logic and user interface pages. Navigates ClarifyCRM objects and components through graphical means. Leverages existing Java tools and experience. Table 3: Features and Functions: Amdocs ClarifyCRM Marketing and Analytics Solutions ClarifyCRM Predictive Analytics Function Churn Management Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) Credit Risk Management Predicts which customers are likely to behave in a certain way and why; promotes proactive customer management. Analyzes and predicts the likely success of an offering to customers of a single new product or service, or packages/bundles of new products and services. Identifies which customer will purchase a specific product. Reveals intelligent cross/up-sell opportunities. Matches specific offers and product bundles to certain customers. Maximizes customer retention through user-specified predictive modeling. Combines data mining, predictive modeling and forecasting techniques to analyze and understand the causes of customer churn. Uses three-dimensional visualization to give insight into churn drivers. Helps enterprises identify high-value customers with a high probability to churn based on usage patterns, customer data and socio-demographic information. Assists companies in designing incentives for customer retention, defining focused retention campaigns, and evaluating retention effectiveness and return on investment (ROI). Enables enterprises to estimate the potential lifetime of their customers. Selects target market segments by ranking and scoring the campaign population on its CLV or churn propensity. Used to help understand customer needs and preferences to help design relationship plans to maximize customer relationships. Designed to help reduce revenue loss due to bad debt by predicting and analyzing the probability of high-risk customers. Optimizes collection activities for delinquent customers. Predicts a customer s ability to pay future bills based on payment behavior. 22 July

4 Table 3: Features and Functions: Amdocs ClarifyCRM Marketing and Analytics Solutions ClarifyCRM Predictive Analytics ClarifyCRM Campaign Function Interface Assumptions Query Handling Based on Xchange, it guides users through the planning, creation and execution of cross-channel, targeted marketing campaigns. Provides Web-based interface with Wizards to accelerate campaign creation and execution. Fine-tunes segment populations through online analytical processing (OLAP)-like pivot table interface. Captures assumptions for response rates, target audience and fixed/variable costs for direct marketing activities. Handles complex queries through a query designer. Queries can reference data from within the customer database or from external sources. Integration Integrates with Amdocs ClarifyCRM sales, service and contact center products. Capabilities Integrates with existing business requirements and processes Java, published APIs, database platforms and other open standards. Segment Designer Allows user to identify the groups of customers to be targeted in a campaign. Identifies customers based on user-defined business criteria within the customer database. Calls functions from external predictive modeling systems. Response Manager Tracks and measures customer feedback and response using sophisticated inference algorithms or user customized algorithms and rules. Measures the impact of marketing promotions based on customer behavior and economics. Calculates the ROI for promotional offers and campaigns. Reporting Provides 20 pre-defined, interactive reports that are grouped into key areas of analysis such as campaign gap, operational and response. ClarifyCRM Opportunity Advisor Function Integration Capabilities Serves as the coordination point for an organization s marketing communications, whether these messages are channeled through the call center, direct mail, or Web pages. Advises call center agent in real-time of the best possible offers to make to a customer. Enforces all the business contact management rules, name selections, offer assignments and list formatting associated with marketing campaigns. Combines real-time rules with in session data and customer information to provide context-driven recommendations. Enables key business logic to be applied across customer touchpoints. Designed to maximize the value and relevance of every customer interaction. Allows plug and play with existing Web applications. 22 July

5 Analysis The Amdocs ClarifyCRM Marketing and Analytics line is designed to help users understand customer relationships, proactively enhance customer loyalty and maximize profitability. The campaign management, data mining and reporting tools are geared to help users identify, analyze and act on customer information. Amdocs, which specializes in billing and process order management software for telecommunications companies, entered the CRM market when it acquired Clarify from Nortel Networks in late 2001 for approximately US$200 million. Since that acquisition, Amdocs has steadily improved the ClarifyCRM line. In late 2002, Amdocs released ClarifyCRM 11 with many enhancements and a variety of new applications, including thin-client, browser-based versions of some of its most popular CRM products. In March 2003, Amdocs expanded its ClarifyCRM application suite through the acquisition of the assets of Xchange, a supplier of campaign management and real-time marketing automation software. Amdocs made the purchase of Xchange, a former CRM competitor, for approximately $5.1 million. When Xchange closed its doors, Amdocs purchased the company s Xchange CRM product, intellectual property and trademarks. Gartner estimates Xchange to have around 70 maintenance-paying customers who now deal with Amdocs. The Amdocs customer base, citing a desire for campaign management capabilities within ClarifyCRM, provided the impetus for the purchase. Xchange is a successful, comprehensive product with campaign planning/management, data extraction, segmentation and back-end reporting and analysis tools. Amdocs felt that Xchange s real-time decision engine and predictive analytical capabilities would fit well within the ClarifyCRM line. Although Amdocs has a moderate presence within the financial services industry, the vendor is looking to boost its status by leveraging Xchange s success within this industry. Amdocs has worked quickly to incorporate Xchange s features into Amdocs ClarifyCRM Marketing and Analytics suite, revamping the product line to reflect Xchange s influences and resulting in the release of v.12 in June Amdocs folded some older products, such as Campaign Management, Churn Management and Credit Risk Management applications into modules that appear in the new and revised ClarifyCRM Predictive Analytics, ClarifyCRM Campaign and ClarifyCRM Opportunity Advisor products. These products have been injected with some of Xchange s most important components. At this point, Xchange may be purchased separately or as part of ClarifyCRM s integrated suite. The new ClarifyCRM Campaign uses elements from the company s former Campaign Management software, but the product is now based on Xchange. For example, it includes Xchange s Segment Manager, which is used to target specific populations. It uses Xchange s Response Manager to help track and assess how customer responses are related to marketing promotions and offers. ClarifyCRM Campaign also incorporates Xchange s extensive reporting facility, with 20 predefined reports on key analysis areas (for example, promotion history statistics, campaign response statistics and campaign ROI actual vs. estimates). Amdocs quick actions in folding Xchange into its portfolio were in part due to reports that on the purchase, many existing Xchange customers started looking for alternative solutions, given Amdocs traditional focus on telecommunications and lack of experience in other industries. Competitors such as Chordiant Software, DoubleClick (Protagona), E.piphany, SAS and several others have already announced migration paths from Xchange to their solutions. Although Amdocs is off to a fast start, the company still must work to further fold Xchange into its portfolio. Unlike large enterprise software companies that provide broad CRM suites to many markets, Amdocs is clearly focused on the telecommunications, and to a lesser degree, the financial services and 22 July

6 manufacturing markets. The company believes in providing in-depth functionality to its chosen vertical markets. ClarifyCRM Marketing and Analysis products can be fully integrated with Amdocs other ClarifyCRM lines Sales and Ordering, and Service and Support. When used together, these products are designed to provide a complete view of the customer. The release of ClarifyCRM 12 brings a more Web-oriented countenance to the series. Nearly all of Amdocs CRM products are now available in thin-client format, with the exception of some lesser-used applications. Improvements have been made to the Process Manager and Integration Gateways to handle J2EE process execution, EJBs, HTTP, JMS, SOAP and XML Web and development standards. Further, the new Customization Center provides a development environment for the creation of ClarifyCRM Web client applications. Amdocs ClarifyCRM s overriding goal is to support end-to-end customer-focused processes in high-performance and scalable environments. Despite the version 12 release, Amdocs still offers a co-existence strategy, which enables ClarifyCRM customers on both the fat-client and thin-client sides to interoperate with one another using the same information repository. Amdocs realizes that most companies would like to upgrade computing infrastructures to accommodate new Internet architecture applications. However, the vendor also acknowledges that today s sluggish business climate is prohibiting many customers from doing so. Amdocs co-existence strategy allows companies to incrementally move to browser-based systems as business requirements and budget constraints allow. Pricing Amdocs does not provide detailed pricing information. The current Amdocs model is to deliver universal ClarifyCRM licenses with a price based on the number of concurrent users. Amdocs is currently evaluating its pricing model to determine the most appropriate approach for all markets. However, this new pricing strategy has not been completed. Customers can choose to purchase a single application, such as Campaign Management or multiple applications to receive the greatest impact. Amdocs plans to have the new pricing approach finalized in the near future. GSA Pricing No. Competitors Although Clarify did not compete against the leading CRM suite vendors customer relationship optimization (CRO) portfolios prior to its acquisition by Amdocs, the inclusion of campaign management and analytical tools in v.12 may see increased competition in this sector. E.piphany E.piphany is an established supplier of analytical and campaign management application software. The company s broad marketing solution offers a strong proposition. E.piphany is one of the leading CRO vendors and has the most comprehensive marketing capability of all of the large enterprise CRM suite vendors. E.piphany E.6, released in March 2002, provides a suite of CRM applications built on a Webbased, multiengined architecture. The solution s analytical power is applied across the entire suite (sales, marketing and customer service). E.6 further integrates the sales- and service-focused applications purchased with the acquisitions of Moss, Octane and RightPoint. The marketing portfolio provides strong functionality across all of the major components of a marketing solution, from data mining to campaign management and personalization. It offers a far stronger CRO proposition than Amdocs ClarifyCRM. KANA 22 July

7 In April 2001 KANA Communications and Broadbase Software merged to form KANA Software. The company s integrated e-crm portfolio, KANA s icare, consists of customer service, marketing and commerce application suites, which can be deployed as one integrated solution or as individual components. The marketing solution consists of two complementary components, marketing automation and marketing analytics. The company is currently developing a unified KANA-Broadbase solution, due fourth-quarter 2003, which supports both Java 2 Platform, J2EE and.net environments. The two companies applications are at various stages of alignment with this strategy. PeopleSoft PeopleSoft s marketing application allows enterprises to run targeted multiwave, multichannel campaigns and uses embedded analytics to provide executive management with campaign insight. The solution is weak, however, compared to industry leaders and lacks depth of functionality in most areas. PeopleSoft relies on multiple partnerships to bolster the application s functionality. The solution uses Unica s datamining technology to offer customer propensity modeling and to extend its offline marketing functionality. In January 2002, PeopleSoft agreed to acquire Annuncio to strengthen its e-marketing capability (online customer profiles and Web personalization), but more needs to be done to deliver an industry-leading portfolio. Siebel Although not yet an industry leading-portfolio, Siebel s marketing and analytical suites have improved substantially through internal development and acquisition over the past 18 months. The acquisition of Paragren, for example, significantly improved Siebel s campaign management capability. Siebel Marketing is now being used at companies with very large data sources and for deploying campaigns with complex segmentations. Siebel s data warehouse, extraction, transformation and loading (ETL) server and enterprise resource planning (ERP) connectors provide a solid base for historical business insight. The integration of nquire adds important real-time reporting and alerting functionality with the ability to gather data from multiple disparate sources previously missing from the solution. In addition, Siebel is the only large, enterprise, CRM vendor that can offer a marketing-focused partner relationship management (PRM) capability with dedicated analytics. Strengths Rounded CRM Billing Capability The integration of Amdocs billing software with the other functions of the CRM suite provides an appealing overall CRM billing proposition for communications vendors. Amdocs claims this experience will extend the solution s appeal to other markets as well. Analytics Amdocs data-mining and predictive modeling applications provide important information, such as churn, customer lifetime value and propensity to buy.these are essential in the current market, where enterprises are looking to retain and maximize customer relationships. Frequent Updates Since acquiring Clarify, Amdocs has twice updated the suite, most recently to v.12. While this frequency adds more and better features integrating not just the original Clarify solution, but also the Xchange products it carries with it some upgrade issues for current customers. 22 July

8 Limitations Multiple Architectures The Campaign application is built on Amdocs client/server architecture. Although Amdocs claims that it is integrated with the ClarifyCRM solution, this does not tie in with the thin-client, e-business road map, and consequently, the functionality will need to be ported across. This reduces its viability for enterprises wishing to deploy the Web-architected thin-client solution, as the campaign management functionality is not available. In addition, Clarify s solution is still bi-architectured, and although the company claims coexistence, a unified thin-client solution with the entire client/server solutions functionality is not available. This further restricts the solution s overall viability. Niche Market Amdocs is well known for its nearly exclusive focus on the communications market. This reputation benefits it in that market, but the mindset of prospective customers could also restrict its expansion into other markets. Recommended Gartner Research Amdocs Clarify CRM Sales Solution, DPRO Amdocs Clarify CRM Service Solution, DPRO Amdocs Acquiring Xchange Will Help Telecom, Financial Customers, FT Company Profile: Amdocs Diversifies to Beat Telecom Adversity, SPRP-WW-FR-0047 Leaders Prevail in the North America CRO Magic Quadrant, M Insight Amdocs acquisitions of Clarify and Xchange significantly strengthen the marketing and analytical capabilities of the vendor s CRM portfolio. Further development work needs to be undertaken to unify the multiple architectures and enhance the solutions functionality. Amdocs ClarifyCRM is most suitable as a rounded, rather than leading, CRM solution for the communication industry. 22 July