PeopleSoft Inc. announced three applications targeting specific industry verticals on Monday.
Two of the products, Enterprise Revenue Management and Enterprise Wealth Management, are designed primarily for the financial services sector, while the third application is Enterprise CRM (customer relationship management) for Higher Education. Enterprise Revenue Management also includes a module for government agencies responsible for revenue-gathering.
Enterprise Revenue Management is a billing and revenue management suite of products designed for insurers, banking institutions and government agencies, PeopleSoft, in Pleasanton, California, said. It integrates customer information from across the organization with rating, billing and collection data, aiming to help reduce bad debts and simplify billing and invoicing.
The suite was developed with SPL WorldGroup Inc., a CRM specialist in the billing area, PeopleSoft said. New applications within it include Premium Billing for Insurance, Fee Calculations and Billing for Banking, and Revenue Management for Government.
Meanwhile, Enterprise Wealth Management aims to help improve the way financial organizations look after and keep relatively wealthy clients, the "mass affluents" with between US$100,000 and US$1 million to invest.
There are four modules to the product: Client Manager, Sales, Portfolio Management and Strategic Account Planning. Client Manager, which will be the first of the modules to be made available, lets bankers and financial advisors automate some aspects of dealing with clients, and work better with the customer by providing access to all the data they need, PeopleSoft said.
The third product, Enterprise CRM for Higher Education, is designed to help colleges and universities recruit, register and keep students, and to keep tabs on fund-raising activities as well, PeopleSoft said. PeopleSoft worked with Ciber Inc., a Greenwood Village, Colorado, systems integrator with experience in private and public sector organizations, on the product, it said.
The Higher Education suite includes marketing, telemarketing and online marketing modules and will work with PeopleSoft's Student Administration software, the company said.
PeopleSoft has tried to strike a balance between developing products for industry verticals, such as those released Monday, and horizontal applications that work across the board, spokesman Rob Cools said.
"For some industries we do have vertical products, but in others, like the government market, we have rolled that back into our general product because we realized that commercial companies wanted many of the same features," he said.
Financial services and education, however, tend to have more specific needs, and many of the applications they use are not useful in other industries, he said.
The Higher Education product will be available in the third quarter in North America, Europe, Asia Pacific and Latin America, PeopleSoft said. Enterprise Revenue Management is available immediately for private and public utilities, and will be more generally available in the second quarter, as will Enterprise Wealth Management. Translated versions of the products are likely to take two to three months longer to appear, Cools said. Pricing information was not immediately available.