Taming The Dreaded CRM BeastTaming The Dreaded CRM Beast

In I.T. circles, implementations of customer-relationship management software have a worse reputation than the Hell's Angels. They're well known for causing trouble, plaguing users with problems of complexity, integration, and scaling, all leading to a high failure rate. But that hasn't stopped Mutual of Omaha from pursuing CRM.

The financial-services company decided in 1999 to change its business model from product-centric to customer-centric, and it needed a new architecture to support its efforts. Enterprise-application vendor E.piphany Inc.'s use of open-standards technology convinced Mutual of Omaha that the vendor's CRM suite would provide the plug-and-play modularity that the company needed.

E.piphany has further convinced Mutual of Omaha by now making available versions of its E.6 component-based CRM platform that integrate with IBM's J2EE WebSphere application server and BEA Systems Inc.'s WebLogic platform. This lets customers use a single open-standards framework to roll out applications, adapt business processes, and share data, says Phil Fernandez, executive VP of products and marketing at E.piphany.

"This is significant for us," says John O'Donovan, first VP of the E-business partnership at Mutual of Omaha. Now that the E.6 suite integrates with the company's WebSphere servers, O'Donovan says, Mutual of Omaha expects to spend far less money and time on future implementations and maintenance.