PeopleSoft Inc. today announced an enhancement to its mobile CRM software and a new mobile synchronization engine.
The 8.4 version of PeopleSoft CRM (customer relationship management), expected to ship next week, adds application modules for mobile sales and field service, along with quality management and collaborative selling.
The Mobile Sales and Mobile Field Service applications are intended to provide disconnected users with access to customer information. Theyre expected to take advantage of new mobile synching technology from PeopleSoft.
The synchronization engine, also due to shipping next week, can synchronize up to a year of updates in six minutes using a LAN, according to PeopleSoft officials. Synching time in testing was less than 10 minutes using a 56Kbps modem, officials said.
The new synching engine has IBMs DB2 Everyplace mobile database embedded in it as well as business logic that determines what data needs to be synchronized.
PeopleSoft CRM 8.4 also includes PeopleSoft CRM Quality Management, which manages the process of tracking product defects and enhancement requests. Another feature, PeopleSoft CRM Collaborative Selling, is a guided selling application that applies needs analysis, recommendation, configuration, pricing, quoting, and order capture to the selling process. This grants an organizations customers and partners self-service selling applications and gives the organization itself better visibility into sales and manufacturing processes, PeopleSoft officials said.
The Pleasanton, Calif., company also announced today a special version of its CRM platform for communications service providers. PeopleSoft CRM for Communications offers sales order capture, order management, service management, and multi-channel support processes for the customer-intensive communications industry.
Its designed to help those companies more effectively target, attract, acquire and retain loyal customers, PeopleSoft officials said.
PeopleSoft rival Siebel Systems Inc. also updated its mobile CRM applications today.