E.piphany adds sales force automation to CRM package

Looking to round out its CRM (customer relationship management) offerings, E.piphany Inc. on Monday officially added an SFA (sales force automation) application to its E.5 suite.

The application, included in Version 5.5 of the E.5 suite, stems from E.piphany's acquisition earlier this year of Moss Software, which produced ActiveSales. San Mateo, Calif.-based E.piphany touts the newly dubbed E.piphany Sales as the CRM field's most analytical SFA application, because of its integration with E.5 suite's analytics technologies.

"With something like Siebel you have to navigate through 10 screens for even simple tasks, and that can be difficult for a [sales] rep," said Brad Wilson, E.piphany's vice president of product marketing. "The idea is to have more fingertip access [to information]."

"The move toward analytics makes this tool more useful to the sales representative community," Wilson said. "The goal here is to link analytics to every phase of the sale cycle."

E.piphany Sales will allow for synchronization of information on a server-to-server basis as well as to laptops and PDAs used by sales representatives on the road.

"This makes all our relevant information available to our guys in the field," said Kevin Grant, senior vice president and CIO at Transamerica Capital, a Denver-based insurance and financial services company. "The key reason we originally settled on the [Moss Software] ActiveSales product was for its field synch module. That effectively takes a sliced view, and a secure view, of our data and puts it on laptops out in the field," Grant said.

Pricing for Version 5.5 of E.piphany's E.5 suite begins at US$250,000.