CRM provider Access Commerce reported revenue of €2.59 million in its second quarter, ended June 30, a 7% improvement over the like period in 2005.
Revenues from the company's Cameleon CRM suite, the mainstay of its business, grew 14% year over year to €1.67 million. The European company will not release operating profit numbers for the first half until Sept. 27, 2006.
"It was a very good quarter," said Kurt Haller, executive vice president at Access Commerce. Haller noted that the Cameleon suite saw very strong demand in Europe, where the majority of the company's business resides. He said it also experienced "solid demand" in the U.S., but admited that revenues were "off a little bit in the second quarter in North America." Access did not reveal the geographic distribution of revenues.
"The company's been focused on returning to profitability," Haller noted in an interview with Managing Automation. Access Commerce managed to turn a corner in 2005 by posting a nominal net income for the year after losses in 2004 and 2003 of nearly half a million euros and more than €2.5 million, respectively.
Access's Cameleon product suite acts broadly to quantify and streamline the sales process -- everything from managing sales leads to facilitating order creation to enabling after-market commerce.
Companies of all stripes have found that things such as ad-hoc discounting and disjointed product reference materials undercut the effectiveness of their sales teams and eat into top-line growth. To that end, Access Commerce has built out its Cameleon line of products to run the gamut from catalog management to e-commerce enablement. Potential customers include companies seeking to mitigate the complexity of offering products through various channels such as direct sales forces, channel partners, and online commerce.
With a shift in its own selling practices at the start of 2006, Access now more closely resembles the companies it hopes to sell to. In the first quarter, Access began employing a direct sales force to augment its sales efforts -- till now the exclusive domain of channel partners such as QAD and Infor. The channel partners will continue to sell the product, Haller said.
In general, the early part of 2006 was a period of change for Access Commerce, according to Haller. The Cameleon suite gained a new module, called Spare Parts, which was announced this March and adds after-market retailing capabilities to the suite.
In addition, Access Commerce acquired European-based product information management (PIM) company Exsyde this April, a deal which has already had an impact on the top line. According to Access, Exsyde contributed €280,000 to overall revenue in the second quarter.
Asked about possible competition from PLM vendors, which are increasingly focusing on product data management, Haller drew a distinction between companies that provide PDM and those that offer PIM. The former, he said, are more focused on the engineering and development efforts involved in bringing products to market, whereas PIM more closely manages the product descriptions and configurations involved in sales efforts.
According to the company, Access Commerce's primary competitors are configuration and online catalog specialists. Access itself is making the transition away from its roots as a product configuration company to a full suite vendor. As the company has expanded its footprint beyond configuration tools, Haller said, "what we're seeing is that customers are buying into our channel vision," and selecting more parts of the suite.
This, he said, explains the 35% increase in the dollar value of the average Cameleon license transaction recorded in the second quarter. Yet, even with that large up-tick in per-deal revenue, Cameleon license revenue grew only 14%. Haller maintained that the number of deals in the quarter did not lag that of previous periods. He described the total as relatively stable quarter to quarter, but said the company does not typically reveal the number of deals it completes.
Another new wrinkle for Access Commerce is a partnership with Microsoft to integrate Cameleon into the Dynamics AX ERP product. Haller noted that two deals in the second quarter involved the integrated Cameleon/Dynamics product, and said the company is optimistic about adding more sales as times goes by.
Access continues to deliver its product primarily through an on-premise, traditional software model, though some customers have chosen on-demand delivery and others the hosted application option.
"We want to do what our customers want to do," Haller said in explaining Access's predilection for on-premise deployments. For the customer base, integration questions are to blame for any hesitancy to embrace an on-demand model. SOA and Web services have been touted as a magic bullet in this respect, Haller said, but aren't necessarily the panacea that would alleviate all worries when linking an on-demand product with a company's systems of record.
While it has sought to expand its customer base into specialty retail and services, Haller said the expanded focus hasn't come at the expense of the core. "Our bread and butter, really since the company's inception, has been manufacturing."
In the quarter, Access Commerce signed deals with, among others, SDMO, a large manufacturer of electrical generators, and Souriau, which makes electrical connection equipment and interconnect systems.