Erik Walters, project manager for DirecTV's sales operations in El Segundo, Calif., faced a difficult challenge: Help 45 area sales managers stay competitive by spending more time with the 5,000 dealers in the company's nationwide retail channel. "The reality of those numbers alone is very daunting," he says. What made the task of staying in touch with their customers next to impossible, however, was the complexity these sales managers faced when remotely accessing customer data.

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Walters concedes that data was not flowing easily from the company's Oracle Siebel CRM system. "Sales reps in the field were at the mercy of different business units, including IT, to pull reports from three or four different locations. By the time this happened, the data was anywhere from a week to a month old," he says.