SSA Global Releases Sales, Service Upgrades

SSA has finished retooling its CRM suite -- one of the company's most significant steps since its acquisition of E.piphany last year -- with the release of its sales and services modules, SSA Sales 7.0 and SSA Service 7.0.

These upgrades followed the release in April of SSA Marketing 7.0.

SSA Sales 7.0 and SSA Service 7.0 incorporate E.piphany's service-oriented architecture and product line into its own open architecture strategy.

"What was then called the 'customer relationship backbone' -- CRB, our customer data integration hub -- is now an integrated part of the SSA Open Architecture," said Patric Timmermans, director, CRM solution marketing for SSA Global.

"The development and release of these three products are a key milestone in our CRM strategy to deliver the next-generation CRM applications," he told CRM Buyer.

New Features

SSA Sales 7.0 includes lead management, account and contact management, opportunity management, sales process management, rollup forecasting, reporting and analytics.

Service 7.0 includes a contact management application, knowledge management, e-mail response, agent workload, work queue distribution and service level management functionality. Other service modules provide mobile field service, e-service and service scheduling.

SSA Marketing 7.0, the first module released since the E.piphany acquisition, also offers a number of new features including customer strategy group functionality, advanced real-time analytics, an improved user and reporting interface, integration with statistical models, rules enhancements, and performance and scalability enhancements.

Link to ERP

The new suite also provides tighter integration to the enterprise resource planning (ERP) module, in particular offering better access to customer information, according to Timmermans.

"The differentiating new feature of the Sales and Service release is the out-of-the-box integration with SSA ERP LN," he said. "This integration includes a shared, continuously synchronized customer and product list" that links the CRM and ERP applications.

The integration functionality helps organizations access information kept in back office systems that typically is obtained using incomplete tools, Timmermans pointed out, such as reports, e-mails, back-office "bribes," hearsay and so on.

With SSA Sales and Service 7.0, "externalized information is retrieved from ERP as the user navigates CRM 7.0," he explained. "Drill-down capabilities reveal more detail on the subject at hand, and users will have visibility to orders, order status, invoices, service calls, service orders, depot service orders, service contracts, maintenance plans, installations, serialized items and more."

Going Private

SSA Global, which has acquired a slew of tech companies over the years alongside the E.piphany transaction, is being taken private by Info Global Solutions, a provider of business software.

On May 15, Info Global announced it would acquire SSA Global for US$1.36 billion, a transaction that is still pending.