BroadVision links commerce to ERP

Redwood Shores, Calif.

BroadVision this week will unveil the Dynamic Command Center - software that ties the company's One-to-One Enterprise 4.0 commerce software into call centers and back-end enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems.

One-to-One - which includes "Commerce" for Web catalog sales, "Knowledge" for information dissemination and "Financial" for banking - can personalize each user's electronic commerce experience. Unfortunately, these applications lack a way to easily tie into the rest of the corporation's operations without writing a lot of custom code.

That situation will all change later this year with shipment of the Command Center's selection of prebuilt Java server and JavaScript hooks to a wide variety of customer service applications.

"We'll have the added capability to link to call centers, touch-tone centers and voice response systems," says Neerav Bery, senior director of product marketing at BroadVision.

Help's a button away

By adding BroadVision's so-called Web agent to a call-center desktop computer, for example, the online Web shopper who has questions could push a "call me now" alert.

That would prompt a customer service representative to contact the customer by phone or chat via the World Wide Web.

The Web agent software would also be able to pull a personalized profile about the customer out of a backend database that might assist the customer support representative.

"We're very interested in what they're doing with this, and we do have plans to link our Web site to our 7,000-seat call centers," says John Samuel, director of interactive marketing at American Airlines. "There are a surprising number of two-phone-line households now, and we'd like to have the reservation agent and the customer looking at the same screen," Samuel says. American Airlines is evaluating exactly how to do this, and BroadVision's approach will be considered.

In addition, the Dynamic Command Center software modules will allow the Web-based One-to-One to share data with ERP systems that include SAP, PeopleSoft and Baan, as well as other applications, such as Documentum.

By opening up BroadVision's software to a wide variety of back-end databases, One-to-One users will no longer have to store customer data in BroadVision's own database.

"This means you don't have to duplicate what you may already have," notes Bill Agnell, senior product manager for One-to-One Enterprise.

Command Center will be sold as part of One-to-One, which typically costs from $80,000 to $300,000.

BroadVision: (650) 261-5100