PeopleSoft has announced three applications targeting
specific industry verticals.
Two of the products, enterprise revenue management and enterprise
wealth management, are designed primarily for the financial
services sector, while the third application is enterprise CRM for
higher education.
Enterprise revenue management also includes a module for
government agencies responsible for revenue-gathering.
Enterprise revenue management is a billing and revenue
management suite of products designed for insurers, banking
institutions and government agencies. It integrates customer
information from across the organisation with rating, billing and
collection data, aiming to help reduce bad debts and simplify
billing and invoicing.
The suite was developed with SPL WorldGroup, a CRM specialist in
the billing arena. Latest applications within it include premium
billing for insurance, fee calculations and billing for banking and
revenue management for government.
Enterprise wealth management aims to help improve the way financial
organisations look after and keep relatively wealthy clients, the
"mass affluents" with between $100,000 and $1m to invest.
There are four modules to the product: client manager, sales,
portfolio management and strategic account planning.
Client manager, which will be the first of the modules to be
made available, lets bankers and financial advisors automate some
aspects of dealing with clients, and work better with the customer
by providing access to all the data they need.
The third product, enterprise CRM for higher education, is designed
to help colleges and universities recruit, register and keep
students, and to keep tabs on fund-raising activities.
PeopleSoft worked with Ciber, a systems integrator with
experience in private and public sector organisations on the
product.
The higher education suite includes marketing, telemarketing and
online marketing modules and will work with PeopleSoft's student
administration software.
PeopleSoft has tried to strike a balance between developing
products for industry verticals and horizontal applications that
work across the board, said spokesman Rob Cools.
"For some industries we do have vertical products, but in others,
such as the government market, we have rolled that back into our
general product because we realised that commercial companies
wanted many of the same features," he said.
Financial services and education, however, tend to have more
specific needs, and many of the applications they use are not
useful in other industries he added.
The higher education product will be available in the third quarter
in North America, Europe, Asia Pacific and Latin America.
Enterprise revenue management is available immediately for
private and public utilities, and will be more generally available
in the second quarter, together with enterprise wealth management.
Translated versions of the products are likely to take two to three
months longer to appear.
Gillian Law writes for IDG News Service