How does the future look for the owner of the Amdocs Clarify CRM system?
When Amdocs acquired Clarify, it led the way in combining its specialization in billing with CRM. This was an exciting story
for the industry as a whole, sparking more acquisitions, and fueling
general interest in the broader integration of departments.
The story since then has been a mixed one for Amdocs customers, although the surge in CRM
has led to some new integration possibilities. The upgrade path for the
once-pioneering Clarify system under Amdocs has had a tortuous history,
with no progression outside of the proprietary Clarify codebase, and
with Amdocs moving awkwardly into thin-client experimentation. Lately
the company has been developing open frameworks.
Even
within the main Amdocs constituency of telecommunications, some Clarify
owners have looked outside of Amdocs for help, notably with the
Dovetail Software enhancements. Amdocs remains focused on telcos, but
is also expanding now into the banking industry, and is developing
significant sales and billing integration tools.
Most IT
departments, however, are still wrangling with integrating decades of
legacy systems, not just tying the front-office into accounting, but
also into the nowadays-so-crucial service and support systems, as well as integrating with ERP systems, and ultimately the whole value chain. With all this spaghetti, let alone with the new SOA and the prospect of on-demand services, there’s plenty of work for systems integrators. Dovetail Software itself is seeing more pure consulting requirements in recent years, and this is true for the larger vendors also.
The major CRM
vendors, including Amdocs, are focused on developing whole-suite
solutions that promise to cover all the business process requirements
of a company, but these all constitute considerable lock-in for perhaps
decades to come.
Meanwhile architecture in general is
changing to enable smaller systems and reusable services, all based on
open standards that offer broad horizons. Lock-in with one major vendor
may just remove a company from the wealth of the network effect, as the
global network grows bigger and richer. For IT decisionmakers, the
choices fall somewhat between the themes of snugness or freedom.
Even
beyond the immediate tasks of integration, CIOs have to look to the job
of reinventing their companies to become functionally and culturally
customer-centric. Coupled with this is the great margin of corporate
knowledge lying ready to be mined, and cultivated anew, and harvested
again and again. What single vendor can supply all the tools to achieve
these goals? Most importantly for IT is to buy products that at least
don’t lock out interoperability with potential other systems
For the Clarify owner, at least, as we’ve said before, some of the choices are simple. Dovetail Software
is the answer for the application suite deployed against the robust
Clarify database. Dovetail products immediately deliver vast feature
and function enhancement, in a seamless replacement install, but more
than this they deliver the freedom to choose the future beyond one
vendor, and outside the confines of CRM.
Microsoft’s
.NET platform is not going away any time soon, and Microsoft itself is
embarked on multiple threads of development that have a way of
converging at useful points. The commitment to open standards is
greater than at any time in the company’s past, although the DNA dies hard of wanting to rule the roost with proprietary lock-ins. Microsoft, as with all IT thinkers today, sees the value of open standards, and knows that it cannot succeed in going against them.
Dovetail offers its own SDK
based on .NET, and a wealth of APIs and Web Services that enable
customization of the Clarify system, both between departments and with
other computing systems.
We will amplify this theme of a future based on freedom using Dovetail products with a Clarify database, stay tuned.
