Amdocs, SAS Team on CRM Suite

Enterprises, particularly in telecommunications, looking for help in customer self-service, SLA management, change management and customer analytics will be offered a new suite from Amdocs Ltd.

Enterprises, particularly in telecommunications, looking for help in customer self-service, SLA management, change management and customer analytics will be offered a new suite from Amdocs Ltd.

Amdocs, best known for its telecom billing and customer management products, will announce this week Amdocs 6, an integrated suite of billing, CRM (customer relationship management), self-service, order management, mediation and content revenue management software that includes integrated customer analytics from SAS Institute Inc.

The release, particularly the SAS partnership, strengthens Amdocs position relative to Siebel Systems Inc., a company that Amdocs expects to see more of in competitive deals after Siebel purchased billing and customer self-service software developer eDocs late last year. The companies have long been competitors in the CRM space, with Amdocs owning the former Clarify CRM product line, an early competitor of Siebels.

"With Oracle [Corp.s] acquisition of PeopleSoft [Inc.], Siebel and Amdocs are the two largest remaining pure-play—or semipure—CRM vendors," said Erin Kinikin, an analyst at Forrester Research Inc., of Cambridge, Mass.

The SAS partnership gives Amdocs an answer to Siebels business intelligence and customer analytics offerings. It will include SAS Telecommunications Solutions integrated with the Amdocs suite so that service providers can track and analyze customer data and present the resulting intelligence within operational support systems, such as billing, call centers and ordering, said Amdocs officials in St. Louis.

Amdocs 6 includes a new application for customer self-service, allowing customers of service providers to manage their accounts, service assurance, ordering and billing. It also includes a new SLA (service-level agreement) management application and an IT change management application, designed to predict and control risks associated with changing IT assets.

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