Circle of change - CRM (1990 to 2010)

Change is expensive, disruptive, and often unpredictable. In the previous article in this series, we related rapid advances in technology fuelling new businesses and business processes and the consequent circle of change.

The picture below depicts how managed CRM became feasible with the advent of Database technologies in late 1980s. It helped automate management of several customer facing operations including support, sales, and marketing. Today CRM solutions are either delivered as a SAAS or are seamlessly integrated into enterprise applications using Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). The evolution of CRM business processes followed ground breaking changes in database, networking and computing technologies. A snapshot of this relationship is evident in the picture below.

Some facts

Vantive, Clarify, Scopus and Remedy were one of the first CRM product vendors in early-mid 1990s. Vantive was acquired by PeopleSoft, which in turn was subsequently acquired by Oracle. Scopus was acquired by Siebel, which was subsequently acquired by Oracle. Clarify was acquired by Amdocs.

I worked for the core engineering team at Clarify from 1996 to 2007. Oracle, SAP, Microsoft are now leading vendors of CRM products.

Disruptive change #1: Client-Server to Internet

The first commercial-off-the-shelf CRM products were built using client-server (2-tier) architecture. Typically, the user-interface, database-interface, and business logic, which were implemented as static libraries in C/C++ programming language, constituted the client part of the application. The vendors of these applications focused their operational energies in supporting different combination of client platforms (Windows, Mac, Unix) and DB-server platforms (Sybase, Oracle, SQL).

Internet as a client platform was disruptive for these CRM vendors, as it put to waste a great deal of energy that went into supporting multiple client platforms. Vendors, like Siebel, who did not invest deeply in supporting multiple clients were able to transition to the internet platform faster than those who did.

Similarly businesses which did not invest deeply in customizing off the shelf products, found it easier to migrate to the newer versions.

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Migration challenges

Many businesses had liberally customized out of box features of the product by using the extension interfaces (VB scripts, custom metadata), and also added several of their own to fill the feature gaps.

Customizations could not be migrated to the new architecture. They had to be re-implemented in the new architecture.

Experience and skill-sets developed during prior customizations were not useful in the new architecture.

Many businesses chose not to upgrade and continued using the client-server version for a long time.

Architecture/Design Lessons – Clarify vs. Siebel

In retrospect, I realize that there were minor, yet fundamental differences between Clarify's and Siebel's product architecture. Siebel could win a substantial marketshare event though Clarify had early lead. Of course, at the next disruption point (SAAS), salesforce.com and new competitors beat Siebel at its game.

Siebel (early)	Clarify (early)
Supported only Windows client. Consequently its development processes were greatly simplified.	Supported multiple UI clients. Complexity of development and support increased many fold. The user interface was minimalist. Clarify subsequently moved to windows only client, but by then Siebel was focusing on other differentiators.
Invested in 3-tier architecture right from the beginning.	Was stuck with 2-tier architecture for a long time. Took a long time to see value in 3-tier architecture.
Provided metadata driven customizations. Migration of metadata was easy, than migration of code.	Clarify provided an integrated VBA (Visual Basic) engine. Customers were encouraged to write lots of custom-code in addition to creating metadata for customizations. Migrating custom code (automatically) to new architecture was later found impossible.
Downplayed customizations and insisted on usage of out of box features and simple customizations.	Showed ease of customizations as a key differentiator, and spent a lot of focus on getting the technology right.
Articulated technology attributes effectively as key differentiators – be it UI, active-synch, n-tier architecture, web-client or integration interfaces.	Even though Clarify had more successful deployments than Siebel, it was always playing a catch up on differentiators.

Amdocs-Clarify and its customers could smoothly tide over the second change-point, when the client framework was upgraded to smart-client. We had imbibed and incorporated the architectural lessons learnt during the first disruptive change.