Rising Star
Dovetail Software’s story
began in the mid-1990s as First Choice Software, a critical technology
partner with Clarify, by then the world’s second-largest producer of
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software.
Into this
vastly burgeoning field, Dovetail brought its rapid deployment of
innovative, custom enhancements for Clarify end-users, and this matched
Clarify’s desire to enlarge its technical competence and breadth of
product.
But Dovetail was distinguished by its design
philosophy: take a custom problem, make a universal solution. Instead
of making one-off enhancements, Dovetail created products that every
Clarify user could use.
Pretty soon the forums were full of
advice to the Clarify community: the more difficult the problem, the
sooner you’d better contact Dovetail, because they’re the best at
getting the most out of your Clarify environment.
Transition to Player
In late 1999, Clarify, Inc. was bought by Nortel, who retained Dovetail’s
expertise on its most difficult challenges, but increasingly used
internal staff for support and development. As 2002 started, Amdocs had
acquired Clarify from Nortel, and Dovetail began the development of its
own platform, as a competitor to Amdocs.
Dovetail’s first market entry was its First Choice Foundation Library (FCFL), which web-enabled its already popular API Toolkits.
Several companies jumped on this new opportunity, and created their own
applications to access and update their Clarify data through the Web.
Dovetail followed this success with innovation in thin-client applications, which allowed end-users to access their CRM
system without a proprietary client-side application on every machine.
Dovetail offered agents thin-client applications for Support, Quality,
Logistics, Call Center, and Self Service.
Market Shaper
Dovetail then took innovation to a new level. Seeing a need to keep pace with
technology, and to build products that could better scale with their
customers’ growing CRM requirements,
Dovetail took a holistic approach to the situation: it went back to the
drawing board and re-wrote its core technologies in .NET, and bundled
them into a software development kit known as Dovetail SDK.
The SDK
developer’s kit, combined with the agent-facing applications, and
crowned with a whole set of new administrative applications, suddenly
allowed customers to eliminate as much of the Clarify software
infrastructure as they desired, all of it if they wished.
Clarify
customers can now completely replace all Clarify applications, and
instead rely on Dovetail – and Dovetail’s development curve – for all
their CS&S (Customer Service & Support) and CRM requirements. And Dovetail continues to aggressively improve its product suite for the Clarify community.
Dovetail
remains unshakably committed to complex, premise-based environments,
where customers depend on the deep functionality which earned the
company its reputation within the Clarify segment.
