Let others debate whether CRM applications deliver better results as in-house deployments or as a hosted service; Entellium can rise above the fray. Offering its product set on both a hosted and on-premise basis, Entellium gives its customers what they want so they can concentrate on a more important issue — their own customers.

“We’re very customer-focused, so we offer both types of solutions depending on customer size and needs,” says Natalee Roan, vice president of sales and marketing for Entellium, a Malaysia-based company with North American headquarters in Seattle. As the product is the same in both incarnations, the choice, says Roan, comes down to what the customer feels comfortable with. “When an account reaches 100 seats or more, some IT departments prefer to bring an implementation in-house — if, for example, they have very sensitive data. On the other hand, we’ve been approached by global corporations that just want us to manage the entire solution for them so their IT staff doesn’t have to take on the additional workload. It’s our job to be flexible enough as a company to provide customers with either option.”

Founded in 2000 with the charter of delivering a hosted CRM suite that was both feature-rich and flexible, Entellium offers Entellium eSalesForce and Entellium eCustomerCenter, its sales and customer service products, respectively, as well as MyEntellium, a business intelligence and team collaboration portal. The products are available as individual modules or integrated suite. Both in-house and hosted models are priced on a monthly, per-user subscription basis, and both deliver regular quarterly upgrades and occasional smaller releases as part of their subscription fee.

Key to Entellium’s ability to differentiate itself from its competitors and offer rich functionality across both models is its sophisticated workflow engine — a typical component of costly in-house systems that Entellium has engineered for a hosted model. This and other capabilities are instrumental in driving what Roan calls “second-generation hosting,” wherein the capabilities of on-demand CRM solutions more closely rival those of on-premise offerings. Roan cites a number of areas where Entellium is driving second-generation hosted CRM:

• Integration: In the area of integration, Entellium’s relative youth in the market has been a great boon — it’s been able to leverage the agnosticism of XML and Web services to allow cross-communication between its products and key back-office data sources. The company makes its integration platform available free of charge as an SDK, and regularly publishes new Web services as customers request them.
  
  “We’ve built our product on Web services on Microsoft’s .NET platform, so we have two-way communication with anything for which a Web service is developed,” says Roan. “When we wanted to integrate with QuickBooks, [an Intuit developer] was able to develop an integration platform in 24 hours.” Entellium also integrates its products to key third-party analytics tools through Web services, though it will bundle sophisticated analytics of its own in its next major release.



• Usability: Led by a CEO — Paul Johnson — who previously served at Apple, it should come as no surprise that Entellium touts usability as one of the most important overall features of its product set. Difficult-to-use products, after all, have been cited as a major contributor to failed CRM implementations. Entellium has enhanced the usability of its suite by breaking the products into modularized components so that customers can purchase just the functionality pertinent to them. For businesses using the entire integrated suite, individual users are able to leverage the functionality of the module they need, without the clutter of superfluous tabs, and can take advantage of read-only views into the other modules when necessary.
  
  “We’ve simplified the interface, so that every [tab] is absolutely essential to helping users do their jobs,” says Roan.



• Customization: Proponents of installing CRM products in-house have long pointed to the inflexibility of on-demand CRM offerings; companies choosing hosted solutions, they complain, have to be satisfied with plain-vanilla implementations. Recognizing that clients will be more effective if they can customize components of their hosted CRM suites, Entellium provides customization capabilities in four areas.

First, individual users can customize the look and feel of the interface, choosing, for example, their color palette, tags or icons. The second area provides for corporate control of interface customization, so that management can enforce policies or ensure, say, that the interface mimic the look and feel of the corporate intranet.

Third, businesses can customize their workflows, enabling the product to better fit their processes and adapt as they grow. “We’ve talked to a number of customers who’d jumped on other hosted products only to grow out of them relatively quickly because they were forced into certain processes,” says Roan. “Entellium allows customers to set business rules in their workflow to reflect their own sales, marketing and customer service processes.”

The fourth area where Entellium enables customization is at the data field level, so that companies can add and track fields as their business needs dictate. Furthermore, customers can populate fields from third-party data sources such as Excel, as well as perform searches and create reports based on customized fields. These kinds of capabilities, Roan says, are typically only available through costly in-house installations, but Entellium offers them as part of the subscription fee.

“We don’t treat our product like a software-based offering where, once you’ve bought the product, there are huge fees for customization and integration,” says Roan.

• Data Access: Entellium recognized early on that one of the main reasons
  many IT managers prefer in-house solutions is that they feel they'll lose
  control over their data with a hosted solution. Entellium raises their
  comfort level with its hosted solution by providing customers access to
  their data whenever they want, including providing a full download in the
  most popular formats upon request.

Pan Pacific Rewards Loyalty, Reaps Revenues

One customer that took full advantage of Entellium’s integration capabilities was Pan Pacific Hotel and Resorts, the international hotel operations division of Tokyo-headquartered Tokyu Group. Using the Entellium eCustomerCenter product under a hosted model, Pan Pacific has been able to overhaul and centralize its VIP loyalty programs, greatly increasing revenues through cross-selling and up-selling opportunities and improving customer service. Though some custom work was needed, the integration effort to provide consolidated views into key databases cost far less than was projected due to Entellium’s Web services architecture.

The eCustomerCenter implementation serves 14 hotels throughout the Asia Pacific region, with Internet access ranging from advanced broadband services in Singapore and Malaysia to more rudimentary access in remote destinations. More than 500 users handling VIP booking activities are able to view up-to-date information housed in the hotel chain’s centralized databases. Via an online portal created using eCustomerCenter, they’re also able to view personalized pages, change personal information and preferences, and receive and redeem incentives. The same portal is used by business managers to track booking activities so they can identify trends to improve marketing and sales programs.

Customers like Pan Pacific are able to leverage Entellium’s extensive functionality for just $45 a month per sales user, $55 per month for customer service user, and $59 per month per user for the integrated suite. Many sales teams, says Roan, are able to pay for Entellium by expensing the fee, much as they would their cell phone bills. Further, Entellium offers read-only access to data through the MyEntellium portal for just $9.95 per user — unlike most hosted providers, who require executives who need data access for reporting purposes to buy another license at full price. The same price applies for access to MyEntellium’s eCollaborate platform, which is ideal for teams who need to share documents among team members and even with outside parties.

Says Roan, “We price MyEntellium so affordably because customer data is very valuable, and we don’t want our customers making decisions on who gets to see key data simply based on price.”

For more information on Entellium, click here.

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