A Seattle-based software maker is hoping to put a new twist to hosted applications. Beyond ala carte modular pricing, the company will let customers design their own rental software package.
Entellium sells hosted customer relationship management (CRM) applications to track information such as customer buying trends and sales forecasts, a market which consists of more established competitors like Salesforce.com and recently CRM heavyweight Siebel Systems.
The firm currently offers customers the option of paying a monthly fee for Web access to a full set of CRM applications or they can choose individual modules within the package, such as sales, marketing or customer service. Beyond modular pricing, Entellium will even allow customers to customise the functionalities they want in its upcoming products, said Dannie Francis, vice president of Entellium Asia-Pacific.
"In future, you'll be able to take a feature from sales, a feature from marketing and a feature from customer service, and create your own," he told ZDNet UK sister site CNETAsia.
"That's a very different strategy from the others. Most of them are going all-in-one," he claimed.
While dictating features within business applications is hardly revolutionary, such customisation is usually confined to conventional packaged software from players like SAP, Siebel or Oracle.
In the world of low-cost software rentals, however, vendors tend to provide a generic set of features so they can achieve economies of scale by selling them to a broad set of customers.
Customisation to suit individual clients will drive up costs and limit the vendor's ability to cross-sell the same product to other businesses, said Alan Tong, IDC Asia-Pacific's research manager for enterprise applications.
"The costs involved in customisation may not justify the effort," Tong added.
To lower costs and ensure profitability amid thin margins, Entellium's global research and development centre and customer support staff are based in the Malaysian capital of Kuala Lumpur. The facility currently houses 50 workers, but Francis said the firm aims to add another 20 to 30 by the end of this year.
The company was initially rooted in Malaysia when it started operations in 1999 but subsequently moved its headquarters to Seattle in the United States in May 2000.
"We shifted our operational HQ to the US, but our plan was always to keep R&D in Malaysia," he said. "Just imagine how much cheaper it is to compete in R&D compared to the US It's about one-third or more in terms of cost savings."
Besides expanding its Malaysian centre, the firm also opened a regional sales and marketing office in Singapore last month, in a bid to expand its customer base in the Asia-Pacific region.
The hosted approach of acquiring software is gaining popularity in the US and mature regional IT markets like Australia. However, the concept has not really taken off in other parts of Asia as most companies remain apprehensive about entrusting their prised customer information to third-parties.
"This is probably the biggest challenge for companies that are pushing the service (hosted applications) to Asia. There is still a lot of education to be done in the region," said IDC's Tong.
To overcome such scepticism, Entellium will soon introduce an "on-premise hosted" strategy so companies have the option of deploying its CRM software at their own offices.
"This is only available to companies who subscribe to a minimum of 100 seats or have a view to build to 100 seats. We think it (on-premise hosted) will have a huge and immediate impact in Asia by eliminating the concern of larger companies and financial institution users who want to keep their confidential customer data on their own servers," Francis said.
