A CRM application's cost of ownership extends well beyond just the initial licensing and implementation fees to include:
the cost of customizing,
integrating,
deploying, and
administering CRM on an ongoing basis.
Enterprise CRM buyers must expand their evaluation focus to encompass platform and architecture criteria that have the greatest impact on total cost of ownership, namely flexibility (as a function of customization and integration), scalability and deployability.
Customization and Integration
Pivotal's metadata-driven architecture separates the customer data from the metadata, which is the business rules that describe how to handle customer data. This architectural feature makes it easy to customize the Pivotal system to match the organization's unique business processes, and to make ongoing changes to the business rules as processes change over time.
Pivotal's integration framework is based on industry standards including XML and SOAP, and leverages middleware components, third party adapters and Web services to deliver integration support for other key enterprise applications. This approach significantly decreases the time, effort and costs involved in integrating Pivotal with other enterprise applications and data, both within and across departmental boundaries.
Our customers identify ease of customization and integration as key criteria for their CRM solution. The flexibility of the Pivotal platform and applications, combined with robust customization tools, best practices, and professional services expertise, is the key to ensuring customer success.
Pivotal has leveraged our core flexibility to create precisely-tailored front office solutions that meet the specific needs of vertical segments, including Financial Services, Homebuilding and Real Estate, Healthcare and Life Sciences. These tailored applications address the common needs of specific industry groups, but still provide the robust customization capabilities and low total cost of ownership that all CRM customers expect.
Deployability and Scalability
Pivotal's architecture is based on the enterprise-strength Intel® and Microsoft® platforms, and offers a range of desktop clients that can be deployed separately or in combination to enable data access from anywhere at anytime. A zero-footprint, zero-install client facilitates deployment across extended enterprises. A seamless mobile client delivers complete CRM functionality, allowing mobile users to function exactly like LAN-based users, with or without a network. Data, application and platform changes are centrally broadcast to all mobile systems and satellites in the same synchronization session so mobile users always have up-to-date applications and business rules on their laptop, ensuring smooth, enterprise-wide implementation of business processes improvements.
As a result, Pivotal CRM provides exceptionally low cost of ownership across the complete CRM lifecycle, delivering a sensible set of commonly needed features out-of-the-box, while ensuring businesses can quickly customize, integrate and deploy a solution to match their current and evolving business needs.
