New Offering Tries To Fill In Gaps Left By Siebel, Salesforce.com

A lot of what needs to happen to close a sale never touches customer-relationship-management systems. So many companies find themselves doing things such as issuing and getting approval on price quotes using phone and fax. Business-process-automation vendor Nsite Inc. attempts to tackle that with a new Web service that links its quote-to-cash business-process framework with Web-based CRM products such as Salesforce.com and Siebel OnDemand.

The Web service is available with Nsite's newest Web-based process-automation offering, Nsite 4.5. A company that integrates its quote-to-cash process with its CRM systems can let customers, partners, and nonusers of its CRM apps offer input to the quote process without being licensed CRM users. The technology also creates links needed to automatically update data in the CRM system during the quote-to-cash process, letting CRM users track activity that previously would have been handled using fax machines, telephone calls, and E-mailed spreadsheets.

"I think they're on to something," says Beagle Research Group analyst Denis Pombriant. Nsite's new capabilities are an important development in a CRM market that has largely overlooked processes that occur outside of CRM systems but are tied to sales and customer-service activities, he says. Efforts to emphasize business processes in the CRM world are overdue, Pombriant says. "We're going to graduate from the talk of data integration to the concept of process integration, which is where we need to be."

CRM vendors have done a poor job of considering business-process workflows that occur outside of CRM systems, so vendors like Nsite have an opportunity to bring added flexibility to the market, Yankee Group analyst Sheryl Kingstone says. "Salesforce.com and the other on-demand vendors don't have this functionality, and it's desperately needed." Both Kingston and Pombriant say there are countless processes beyond quote-to-cash that still need to be automated and linked to CRM systems, but that Nsite's offering represents a good start.

Nsite's quote-to-cash Web-services integration tool is priced at $3,000, and its on-demand process automation service runs $20 a month per user.