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ERP Contract for Oregon City Won by Agresso

February 04, 2008

ERP vendor Agresso has won a five-year software subscription license with the City of West Linn, Oregon, for a product suite. The agreement, valued at $690,000, provides the West Linn government with an on-demand software delivery model.


Steve Arndt, Chief Technology Officer for the City of West Linn, said with the expense the city was incurring to make ongoing changes to their former product, "we could never get ahead and the functionality was still lagging."

Asked if he any of the larger ERP providers, Arndt said he received an initial proposal from Microsoft Dynamics and another from an Oracle back-end support product.

"Microsoft's proposed product fell short both on functionally and from a web-deployment perspective," Arndt said. "And as for Oracle, I considered that thought for all of five minutes. I've been down that road with Oracle before and know that they are a massive undertaking that usually costs a lot more than you planned."

In November Agresso, announced the availability of Agresso CRM, a customer relationship management product aimed specifically at the mid-market services sector that Agresso's been working as an ERP vendor for over 20 years.

Agresso CRM was rolled out globally via either a standard, on-site license or software-as-a-service agreement.

The Agresso offering for sales and marketing staff is either standalone or integrated into the Agresso Business World enterprise resource planning suite in place at over 2,700 companies globally. 100 percent Web based, it can run on multiple databases, operating systems, and stationery or mobile devices, Agresso officials say.

Agresso CRM is part of a larger corporate strategy "intrinsic to the company's plans to grow to a $700 million company by 2010," Agresso officials say, adding that the company has been growing at 40 percent or more in 2007 on the strength of its flagship ERP product line, Agresso Business World, which was released in late 2005.

Agresso CRM is the first in a series of what the company calls "BLINC -- Businesses Living IN Change" plug-ins, and will provide integration to their ERP suite.

Agresso's parent, Unit4Agresso in the Netherlands, evaluated a wide scope of global CRM partnership strategies, including an alliance with Microsoft. Agresso had also acquired a European-based company with a strong CRM product, CCS of Spain, nearly a year ago that brought a base of 1,700 customers. Nearly 10 percent of those customers are in a SaaS model.

"We carefully reviewed the business requirements of our target market against all of our options to acquire the best possible CRM product," said Jose Sanchez, managing director of Agresso Spain and a member of the Unit4Agresso Board. "It was our original intention to partner with Microsoft, who we thought might come closest to meeting the CRM needs of mid-market, services organizations. However, neither the Microsoft CRM product line, nor any other we reviewed, were as robust as our acquired CCS technology."

The company has established a Spain-based CRM Service Hub of more than 100 full-time professional services employees, with "decades of years of CRM experience selling, implementing and supporting Siebel and Microsoft products, as well as the original product underpinning Agresso CRM," company officials say.

Earlier in November Agresso said its customer Destiny Resource Services Corp. is projecting more than $300,000 annual savings on the strength of new business efficiencies following the purchase of Agresso's Project Costing and Billing module.

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David Sims is a contributing editor for ContactCenterSolutions. To see more of his articles, please visit his columnist page.
 
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