E.piphany to Integrate Microsoft MapPoint

E.piphany's E.6 suite of applications is built on Sun Microsystems Inc.'s Java2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) architecture, a rival development framework to Microsoft's .NET for delivering Web services. Although the architectures take different approaches to Web services, using one framework does not exclude use of applications that are built on the other framework.

Each of these architectures is designed to streamline the use and integration of components and applications from multiple vendors.

The integration of Microsoft MapPoint will enable users of E.piphany E.6 to map customer locations, obtain driving directions, and plot travel itineraries without leaving the E.piphany application.

"In order for sales teams to be effective, they have to understand their customers, and to do that they need real-time intelligence. The addition of the Microsoft MapPoint service into E.piphany Sales 6 will give our customers' sales teams added location intelligence without added process complexity, and will demonstrate the benefits of using our Web Services--ready CRM solution," says Phil Fernandez, executive vice president of products at E.piphany.

E.piphany E.6 received kudos from market researcher Patricia Seybold Group, in a comparison study that included Oracle, PeopleSoft, SAP, and Siebel CRM product suites. "Clearly, E.piphany E.6 is the best architecture in the group of five CRM architectures that we evaluated," the report stated. "It's open, flexible, easily customizable through metadata, and offers a broad range of approaches for integration of external applications."