Clarify was an early CRM player and a successful one - it was ranked No. 2 in market share when Nortel Networks announced plans to buy the company in October 1999. Today it's No. 11, according to AMR Research. But not for long, says Amdocs, a billing and order management software vendor that bought Clarify from Nortel in November 2001 and is determined to orchestrate its comeback. The first fruits of its labor can be seen in the new version of the Amdocs ClarifyCRM suite, which is being announced this week. Dror Pockard, president of Amdocs' Clarify division, recently spoke with Senior Writer Ann Bednarz about Amdocs' plans to restore Clarify's luster.
What was the biggest challenge for Amdocs in the first 10 months that it owned Clarify?
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The biggest challenge was to bring Clarify back to the picture. Clarify was fairly closed during the Nortel period. Even things that were being developed in the product were not [being promoted]. Clients are asking now for more services and more commitment. I think, therefore, one challenge was bringing the product back to the market and getting back client confidence after two mergers. We're investing a lot into our existing client base. The second [challenge] was to very quickly deliver a new product which is up to speed, and this is what we're doing with Release 11.
Clarify was the No. 2 CRM vendor a few years back. Do you hope to regain that position?
We have our eye on Number One. I think that if you dig into the data about what our competitors are doing, by far with the service providers we are Number One. In the other industries, we will be there shortly.
Most of Amdocs billing and order management customers are telecommunications companies. What other industries will the Clarify division target?
Clarify, besides telecom, was very strong in high-tech manufacturing and financial services. We would like to build upon this strength and achieve the same success we have in the telecom industry. We are considering some additional verticals as well.
One of the features in ClarifyCRM 11 is a new architecture that lets browser-based and client/server applications coexist. Are customers looking for a migration path that lets them migrate to thin clients at their own pace?
Definitely, yes. We hear it from clients again and again. In so many other cases, when clients switch over to thin client, it's a huge investment. And clients don't really want to invest so much. Clients want to pick and chose where it makes sense to switch to thin client and don't want to do heavy implementation where it's not required.
Was Amdocs able to win new Clarify customers in 2002?
We have had some very good successes and wins since the acquisition. Especially in the service provider industry, but not just among the clients that were already clients of Amdocs. For example, Cegetel is win, the second-largest telecom operator in France. They were not [existing] Amdocs clients. In the area of non-telecom clients, we had some great successes, but mainly with existing clients. And that was the intention from our perspective - to invest and to make sure these clients were happy.
Was Amdocs able to retain the Clarify development team after buying Clarify from Nortel?
You'll be amazed that we have almost zero churn in the Clarify R&D team. Actually, most of the R&D team has gone through all that Clarify went through and stayed with Clarify. We have a very strong team with lots of years spent in Clarify.
Product development seemed to stall while Clarify was owned by Nortel. What is Amdocs doing to repair that perception?
We managed to keep the Clarify team and to expand it. We expanded the R&D budget devoted to CRM substantially. We believe that actually brought back some of the old Clarify business. And we believe that we have a very good product development team. We have done a lot on the product development side, also in customer service and in working with clients on their implementations.
How are customers responding?
We're getting excellent feedback. But you always have to do more. We're working on all aspects, from customer service through sales and support, through R&D, through marketing. The machine is working very hard.
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