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Interface
Sales reps have power with program that tracks customers

	GREG GILBERT / THE SEATTLE TIMES James Wong, CEO of Avidian Technologies, aimed to make customer-relationship software easier to use.
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What: Avidian Technologies

Who: James Wong, co-founder and chief executive officer

What it does: Developed Prophet, customer-relationship management (CRM) software that integrates with Microsoft Outlook.

Why: Over the past few years, many industry analysts, including the Gartner Group, have cited failure rates for CRM installations as high as 50 percent. Wong thinks some of those failures occur because some workers find CRM too cumbersome to use.

What it does: Prophet users manage their contacts database from a Prophet contacts file tab that's listed in the existing Outlook file structure and is populated with the information the user has already collected in Outlook. However, within the Prophet contacts interface, users can group contacts by company, view detailed, time-stamped notes of interactions and see all e-mail sent between the user and the contact.
 

Creating opportunity: Users keep track of information about the contact by choosing drop-down menus that can be customized. Such information includes which product the customer is interested in, how much the sale might be worth, where the sales person met the customer and when the customer wants to meet next.

Sharing and reporting: Prophet allows users to create 30 types of reports based on information detailed in the contacts files.

Price: A single-user edition costs $150.

Server edition: Last week, Avidian introduced a server-based version. Data stored in the Prophet application will also be saved on a back-end server so other users can access it. The cost for the server edition that supports five users is $995.

Sales: More than 900 companies have started using Prophet since the product was launched in August. Sales have grown by 40 percent each month since the launch.

The competition, Part 1: ACT! and GoldMine are Avidian's main competitors, but a new threat has emerged in Microsoft, which introduced Business Contact Manager. That product is an add-on to Outlook.

The competition, Part 2: The Microsoft program might appeal to small- to medium-size businesses. "However, it has a couple of critical classic Microsoft Version 1 issues," said Wong. For example, it works only with certain e-mail services. In addition, it's a single-user product.

The future: Wong expects four or five years will pass before Microsoft may introduce a product that competes directly with Prophet. He hopes to stave off that competition by amassing 300,000 users by 2006.

Employees: 20

Profits: Avidian said it was profitable in 2003 and expects to be profitable this year.

— Nancy Gohring

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company