Janice P. Anderson, Chairman, CEO and President of Onyx Software Corp., didn't hesitate in delivering her answer when asked to describe her firm's greatest core competency.

"The business answer, which is the one that came first, is that we really tie our success to our customers' success," Anderson said.

She also provided a "technology answer" to the question.

"We produce enterprise-class application software for handling, interacting and processing
customers that actually flexes and integrates very well in a complex environment."

A Process Management Piece

When asked to describe the company's greatest point of differentiation, Anderson described her company's process management capability.

"It is a business process set of tools that gives clients a very cost-effective way and a very robust way of creating workflows and automated work tasks, whether it's system-to-system or person-to-person. It's a rules engine so that you can really take your customer handling intentions and automate them and systematize them inside your company, even though you may have hundreds or thousands of employees."

Onyx Software provides integrated enterprise solutions for customer relationship management, process management and performance management. Its solution for managing customer interactions consists of three audience-specific portals: an employee portal, a partner portal and a customer portal. This Internet technology platform enables its customers to combine customer management functionality with data from other enterprise systems and the Internet to manage all aspects of their customer relationships. The company’s process management solution consists of a business process engine combined with a rules builder, a process designer and an integration engine. Onyx Performance Management, built on the industry-leading Cognos 8 platform, provides an environment with drag-and-drop simplicity for the creation of reports, dashboards or more complex, sophisticated analysis.

By combining CRM and BPM, Onyx intends to help customers with cross selling/upselling, with more efficient handoffs within the business and to help them modify and improve their processes and interactions. Anderson notes that the market is responding and that over 17 percent of last quarter’s license revenue came from the newly launched Process Management product portfolio which was announced in April.

"What we find in the services sector is that the world is fairly complicated. The processes, the front-line workers, training, branding — these sort of 'soft' concepts, which are quite difficult, are how they define revenue growth, market share and differentiation."

Targeting Medium-Sized Businesses

The company complements its software offering with consulting, customer support and training services. It serves large enterprises, governments and medium-sized businesses in various sectors worldwide. In fact, more than two-thirds of new license revenue in 2004 came from enterprises that were $2 billion or larger.

"I find SMB one of the most interesting acronyms because companies under 50 employees would not be a good fit for Onyx, but a company that's [generating] $150 million [in annual revenue] that's got a lot of complex services and that's looking to double their business in the next three years is a wonderful client for us. We do a lot of business there. We "We are participating a lot in the SMB market, but it's mostly in the 'M'."are participating a lot in the SMB market, but it's mostly in the 'M'."

The company markets its software and services through a direct sales force, value-added resellers, systems integrators and original equipment manufacturer partners.

Growth Strategy

The Bellevue, Washington-based company is just over 10 years old and has a growth strategy in place.

"[We want to] get into the game with more customers and to do that with more partners. We're launching a major initiative focused on partnering and building out a partner alliance program. We've done very well outside of the U.S. in select markets with partners … but we haven't done as much in the U.S. Our challenge is to get out there and get more conversations going with more possible clients."

Onyx Software Corp.'s aggressive approach includes the fact that it will provide customers of Siebel, PeopleSoft, Vantive, JD Edwards and Oracle CRM products a credit of up to $500,000 toward professional services. The reason: the company wants to help these customers switch to Onyx's customer and process management software.

"We are sharing with the market that we are looking to grow the top line. We are looking to exponentially impact our partner revenue. That can take 18 to 24 months because of sales cycles for large customers and big partners, and it takes time to prove-in for each partner, a good value proposition for all the parties — the customer, the partner and Onyx."

Anderson reports 14 percent growth in the firm's software business during the past six quarters, and indicates that 77 percent of Q2 license revenue was from new customers.

"Many of the larger players have not been doing that level of growth, at least [not] without acquisitions."

She described the company's market share as modest, placing it somewhere below five percent.

"For the target clients we go after, we'd like to get into the 10 percent range or more. Where we are choosing to play, like wealth management, we've achieved solid market share. In healthcare, insurance and government, we've achieved up to 10 percent to 15 percent range, and we'd like to do that in a broader market."

"We believe there’s a possibility for growth right there [in our target markets]. We're all about capturing that growth. The software industry's job is to make business strategies possible."

Bridging The Gap

When asked to describe the industry's greatest need, Anderson said the technology industry needs to bridge the gap collectively and more effectively between service providers and clients.

"[We need to] manage and think more in their world rather than in ours. I think that customers still keep expressing that they really would like things in their language, in their format and more digestible for them to understand the value to their business. "I think that customers still keep expressing that they really would like things in their language, in their format and more digestible for them to understand the value to their business."More business value, front and center, I think is key. And I think that's a big challenge for the industry."

Oracle's Purchase Of Siebel

"The customers who value integration with a myriad of things that go on in their world are not going to necessarily be willing to roll over and work with a large company when it doesn't have value to them. People have different visions about size versus intention, and they now care about what your intentions are as a supplier and a vendor and a partner, and not just your size that matters."

"With Oracle adding to its assets, there's your 'high-end, buy-everything-from-me' [approach, but] on the other hand you have a lot of functions that automate one department really well. I think that these mergers are going to narrow some of the choices for customers… and I think that could cause some creativity and diversification in the industry."

Speed and Flexibility

Anderson believes her firm can provide the employee portal for companies deploying VoIP or distributed network call centers. She also envisions a sizable market for business services when it comes to outsourcing.

"Customers select Onyx because we give them that speed and flexibility and low cost … which is hard to achieve. And their experience once they go ahead with a project based on Onyx, is that it proceeds on time, on budget and they constantly tell us, 'That's never happened here before.' "

If her firm had a motto, it would probably be: the customer is the center of all that we do.

"I haven't had too many companies say to me, 'I've got all the revenue I ever wanted from everybody.' Nobody
says that."

Anderson believes there are variations of growth questions that most companies are trying to answer, such as: How do I do a better job for the customers? How do I keep them? How do I grow them? Do I go into new geographies? Do I diversify my product lines? Do I buy a company? Do I merge something? Do I have new channels?