Portrait Software has more empathy than most with Siebel's demise: in its previous incarnation as AIT, Portrait went through its own 'near death experience'. But unlike Siebel, Portrait was able to get back on track and has repositioned itself in the market.
"It is the PeopleSoft customers who should be the most worried," argues Sarah Haskell, Group Marketing Director at Portrait. "Or if I was a customer running Microsoft's SQL Server database then I'd be worried. But there's an opportunity there for Microsoft ISVs and us to market proactively to the PeopleSoft and Siebel customers running SQL Server."
But doesn't that put Portrait on a collision course with Microsoft itself? "Not really," declares Haskell. "We are looking at high volume business to consumer transactions with millions of customers that need to be multi-channel. The big gap in the Microsoft CRM armoury is that high-volume, multi-channel capability.
"We compete in a different way to the on demand vendors. The marketing powers of the likes of Salesforce.com and RightNow are big of course. We have to make sure that the market understands the different needs between SME and large enterprise markets; whether they want to have things hosted or not, the larger the organisation is, the more complex the processes will be. Salesforce.com and RightNow do sit in a different target audience. Portrait markets to tier one, tier two and tier three organisations with more complex processes. There is some crossover when you get to tier three.
"We have to deliver everything in the way that the customer wants. We believe that the CIO today wants to buy processes as services in a service-oriented architecture. Portrait provides process flexibility for CIOs. The likes of Salesforce.com are focused on a particular point of pain with little process flexibility. Portrait works with partners who are able to develop against specific points of pain in a highly relevant way - as Fiserv have done using Portrait to develop its sales and service platform for Retail Banks. A solution which can be offered as a hosted model, as a managed service or on-premise."
Haskell believes there is still more consolidation to come in the market. "CRM is not a greenfield market any more," she argues. "It's now about how you sweat your assets. The big question is - can the bigger powerhouses maintain innovation? Smaller vendors tend to bring innovation with them.
"There are some companies out there who are techno savvy, others who will take a risk and there are others who follow the herd. For the herd followers, the consolidation will be a good thing, but the downside could be lack of innovation that could result. Big vendors tend not to be innovators, they tend to be followers. When was the last time that Siebel or Oracle or Microsoft or SAP came out with something innovative for CRM?
"Ultimately the CRM landscape changes because the customers are changing. I have a strong view that if you can get your arms around the customer experience and put processes in place to improve that experience, then that is where benefit comes from. From our perspective, the key is to provide flexibility and ability to adapt to change."
By Stuart Lauchlan
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