Nearly five months after completing its $155 million acquisition of electronic commerce software vendor Comergent Technologies Inc., Sterling Commerce today released an extension of the Comergent product platform: a module that automates the management of service and subscription contracts associated with manufactured products.
The new module, Sterling Service Contracts, is intended to support manufacturers that are attempting to increase revenue by concentrating on offerings such as post-sales service contracts, said Joel G. Reed, Sterling's vice president for global product marketing, in a briefing with Managing Automation.
"Right now, service contracts are a major source of growth for many manufacturers," Reed said.
Sterling Service Contracts will help manufacturers do a better job of identifying opportunities for selling and upgrading service contracts, Reed said. The product allows manufacturers to manage the often complex business rules that govern how products and services are bundled and priced. It also helps automate the monitoring of maintenance agreements, service commitments, and warranties, and the notification of customers whose contracts may be about to expire. And the module allows manufacturers to manage the sale of service contracts through the same self-service Web sites where they sell finished products.
Sterling Service Contracts uses the product configuration and pricing engine that Sterling acquired along with Comergent. It will be part of the Comergent product line, which has been renamed the Sterling Multi-Channel Selling Solution. Sterling's core suite prior to the Comergent acquisition, the Sterling Selling & Fulfillment Suite, also supports order fulfillment processes, such as supply chain execution, warehouse management, and payment processing.
The announcement of the Service Contracts module indicates Sterling's commitment "to the success of the Comergent functionality," wrote Ray Wang, a Forrester analyst, in a recent report on the acquisition.
"We believe that the Comergent platform strengthens Sterling's sell-side capabilities, offering multi-channel order visibility from end to end, while Sterling brings Comergent customers stronger order-fulfillment-to-order-completion capabilities," Wang wrote.
Sterling's long-term plan is to deliver tight integration between its legacy order fulfillment products and Comergent's sell-side applications, Reed said. Sterling, a unit of AT&T, will rationalize overlaps between the Comergent and Sterling products and, using Sterling's business process management tools, define workflows that help manufacturers manage the entire order opportunity-to-fulfillment business process. Tight integration between the Sterling and Comergent products is expected within 12 months, Reed said.
In the meantime, Sterling has begun to deliver a limited level of integration between existing Sterling and Comergent applications. The company, for example, is merging product catalogs and pricing engines from the two environments and providing integration supporting specific business processes, such as integrated account profile management. Sterling customers can take advantage of that level of integration today, Reed said. Many Comergent customers will need to migrate to a current release of the applications and perform some data migration in order to take advantage of the integration being offered by Sterling.
In the wake of the Comergent acquisition, Sterling claims 30,000 customers worldwide. Major manufacturing customers include Gates Corp., NEC Solutions America, Pitney Bowes Inc., and The Toro Co.