Pivotal Announces Winners of CRM Innovator Awards

“Microsoft is proud to sponsor the CRM Agility and Innovation on Microsoft Technologies category of Pivotal’s inaugural CRM Innovator Awards program,” said Alex Pombo, group manager of developer and platform evangelism at Microsoft Corp. “With a shared vision for increased adoption of .NET Framework-based technologies and interoperability, Pivotal and Microsoft have worked together to help industry-leading organizations like NEON Systems capitalize on their investments in Microsoft technology and Pivotal’s flexible CRM applications. I would like to commend these companies for their outstanding success in using Microsoft technology to drive business value from their CRM initiatives.”

Pivotal created the annual Pivotal CRM Innovator Awards to recognize customers who are making outstanding use of Pivotal and Microsoft technologies to deliver a superior customer experience and drive profitability. The inaugural 2005 awards program was open to all Pivotal customers, and applications were received from a wide variety of industries including business services, manufacturing, financial services, homebuilding and high technology.

Winners submitted applications that clearly demonstrated standout results in three categories; CRM agility and advancement on the Microsoft platform, innovation in improving the customer experience and execution in achieving outstanding levels of end-user-adoption. For 2005, the winners and finalists from each of these categories are:

• CRM Agility and Innovation on Microsoft Technologies – NEON Systems, Inc.
• Finalist - Mold Masters Ltd.
• Innovation in Improving the Customer Experience – Wayne Homes
• Finalist - Earle M. Jorgensen Company
• Execution in Achieving Outstanding Levels of End-User-Adoption – Avendra
• Finalist - North Shore Credit Union
• Profile of a Winning CRM Strategy – NEON Systems, Inc.

NEON Systems, Inc., is a provider of enterprise-class mainframe integration solutions. NEON's Shadow RTE technology is designed to reduce the complexity of mainframe integration to allow large organizations with significant commitment to mainframe systems to streamline redundant point integration solutions in order to lower the total cost of ownership associated with integrating legacy systems.

With a vision for customer relationship management that called for customer retention rather than engaging in the more costly process of attracting largely new customers, NEON realized that it required a technology platform and suite of applications that would work closely together to address all aspects of the company’s customer-facing processes. Having outgrown the capabilities of the company’s legacy GoldMine application, NEON deployed Pivotal to complement its already Microsoft-centric IT infrastructure.

“At NEON Systems, we rely on Pivotal and Microsoft technologies to run our business operations,” says Paul Deschenes, director of corporate applications, NEON Systems. “While we were initially drawn to Pivotal for its traditional CRM capabilities, we quickly found it had the ability to be extended to support other business functions, such as customer support, expense management and reporting. Pivotal has proven to be a very flexible platform, and because it is built on Microsoft SQL Server 2000, it easily integrates with our Microsoft applications, such as Microsoft Office 2003, Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003, SQL Server Reporting Services and the .NET Framework 1.1 Web applications.”

NEON Systems makes extensive use of closely-tied Pivotal and Microsoft technologies in running its business and providing a quality experience for its customers. The company’s customer service Web portal is built entirely in Microsoft ASP.NET and provides access to customer support incidents in the Pivotal System and through XML and Web services, as well as enabling customers remote access to NEON’s software applications and knowledge base.

NEON also relies extensively on SQL Server 2000 Reporting Services to report on critical customer information contained in the Pivotal system. Today, the company can quickly produce reports on key business decision-making information such as lead generation metrics, account penetration plans and product placement analysis. The combination of Pivotal and Microsoft technologies has helped NEON to optimize internal business processes resulting in increased operational efficiencies and improved customer service.

According to Rick Marquardt, president, Pivotal, “Many factors play into the success of a CRM initiative. The winners of this year’s Pivotal CRM Innovator Awards come from a diverse set of industries but they all have one common characteristic; NEON Systems, Wayne Homes and Avendra each have a clearly-articulated CRM vision that calls for flexible, on-premise technology that can be very closely tailored to their unique businesses. For these organizations, CRM is not a technology – it is a business strategy felt in every department of their companies and a major component of their competitive advantage in the market. By selecting flexible technologies from Pivotal and Microsoft, winning companies can create the customer experience their business calls for – without compromise.”