E.piphany says that with its E.6 application, it is seeking to put the "CR" back in CRM. E.6 offers a full set of intelligent applications for marketing, sales, service and enterprise analytics, according to the company.
By melding analytical and operational CRM capabilities, the Web-based technology helps drive effective and personalized interactions with customers, explained Phil Fernandez, E.piphany's executive vice president of products and marketing 
.
"The secret sauce, if you will, is integrating these functions in real-time," Fernandez told CRM Buyer Magazine. These ingredients are key for customers in E.piphany's major markets, he said -- the largest of which is financial services, followed by telecom and media, travel and leisure, retail and manufacturing, and technology.
The Breakdown
The technology is offers the following capabilities:
, and sales managers can keep abreast of the pulse of business through analytics and forecasting algorithms.
Generally available and priced at approximately US$250,000, depending on the implementation, the CRM suite leverages standard Java 
2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) technology, which supports building Web-based applications in modular chunks.
No Costly Reengineering
The technology is distinctive, said Mitchell Kramer, an analyst at Patricia Seybold Group. "E.6 is open, standards-based and completely modern," he told CRM Buyer. "All of its products are accessible by users on the Web."
E.6 seeks to distinguish itself by presenting a single view of the customer. By intelligently managing customer data that may reside in diverse systems, Fernandez said, the suite provides a flexible model and robust integration technologies designed to work with existing technology investments. "Customers can use E.piphany to weave together separate silos of data without costly reengineering," he pointed out.
However, the company will continue to work on ways to improve this process of tying together data from different sources, Fernandez said, adding that E.piphany and its competitors -- including PeopleSoft, SAP (NYSE: SAP) and Siebel -- have far to go on this front. "2003 will be about developing new-generation CRM platforms to help customers clean up this mess created by diverse silos," he said. "The aim is to prevent churn. It's not simple. We need to proactively have a holistic effort to hang on to our best customers."
The problem stems in large part from the fact that purchasing systems and supply chains are not integrated, Kramer said. "The whole area of integration is incomplete, whether you're talking about data or application integration," he maintains.
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