The Move To In-House CRM Consolidation Grows

Another company is consolidating its CRM software on a single platform. Two weeks ago, Hewlett-Packard said it was standardizing on Siebel Systems Inc.'s software for thousands of users worldwide. Salesforce.com Inc. will reveal Tuesday a much smaller consolidation--but still significant for the smaller hosted vendor.

Enterprise software company Geac Computer Corp. has signed a $500,000 deal with Salesforce. Tim Wright, chief technical officer and chief information officer for Geac, says the company is standardizing its global sales and marketing operations around Salesforce, having already implemented the software with about 200 employees in the United States and Europe. The Salesforce system is replacing a variety of other CRM software that had been used by the company, Wright says.

Wright joined Geac on Jan. 1 and says "it become immediately apparent that Geac was in dire need of improvements across the board in terms of some of our internal process management." Geac has fueled its growth through acquisitions, including Comshare Inc. and Extensity earlier this year, resulting in the company's running a wide range of disparate software systems.

"I wanted to unify the customer databases so we could look at where we had the same customers or similar profile customers across these businesses, and so that we could see where there were opportunities to sell additional products into that customer space," Wright says.

Geac began deploying the Salesforce software in March and completed U.S. deployment in July and Europe this month, Wright said. Additional company deployments are expected in the future.

"I've been a CIO for over 10 years and have done this a few times," he says. "I've had implementations go very badly in this space, so I was prepared for the worst and pleasantly surprised by them beating my best expectations. We set a date and they hit it."