ZDNet - Tech Update

Standards may fix CRM integration
By Jeff Moad
eWEEK
January 18, 2002   
http://techupdate.zdnet.com/techupdate/stories/main/0,14179,2837632,00.html

Software customization, training, maintenance and license fees aren't the only 
things that raise the cost of CRM deployments. Integration, experts say, can 
also be a major, costly challenge. 

That's because, in most large enterprises, customer information is captured 
and stored in multiple systems. Bringing it all together for analysis in a 
customer resource management system usually involves time-consuming integration 
using proprietary APIs provided by CRM and other enterprise software vendors. 

A possible solution to that problem may be on the horizon. OASIS, or the 
Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards, 
the XML interoperability consortium, recently embraced a variation of 
XML intended to serve as a standard, automated way for systems to share 
information about customers and customer interactions. 


The proposed standard, called extensible Customer Relationships Language, 
or xCRL, is a set of XML vocabulary specifications for defining customer 
characteristics such as name, age, customer number, e-mail address and so on. 
In addition, xCRL defines in a standard way how individual customers and 
organizations interact with one another. So, at least in theory, if a given 
CRM system and, say, an enterprise resource planning system both understood 
xCRL definitions, they could automatically interoperate without needing expensive, 
custom integration. 

"Enterprises could use xCRL to mix and match customer information without the 
need to do hard-wired integration," said Ron Schmelzer, an analyst at 
ZapThink LLC, a research company in Waltham, Mass. 

As potentially beneficial as that sounds, however, it's far from clear how quickly 
enterprises will see the benefits of xCRL. Although last month OASIS said it had 
accepted the xCRL definitions as a standard, most CRM and other enterprise software 
vendors have yet to embrace the standard. 

Schmelzer predicted CRM vendors such as Siebel Systems Inc. and PeopleSoft Inc. 
will do so reluctantly and only under pressure from enterprise customers. Supporting 
something such as xCRL would not only bring added development expense, Schmelzer 
said, it would also make it easier for enterprises to mix and match CRM products. 

Indeed, some major CRM vendors recently seemed cool to xCRL. A spokeswoman for 
PeopleSoft said the company was not familiar enough with the specification to 
comment on it, and an official from Siebel said that while the company has provided 
mapping and transformation services between its applications and some 
vertical-industry XML definitions, Siebel has no current plans to support xCRL 
in the same way.