IBM To Establish CRM, Other Systems for KPN

By David Sims

TMCnet Contributing Editor

 

The Dutch telecom provider KPN has selected IBM (News - Alert) as its lead System Integrator to transform its billing systems, establish a new Customer Relationship Management (CRM) product, and transform its business intelligence over the next three years.

 

IBM Global Business Services will implement a new CRM suite based on Oracle (News - Alert) eCommunications (including Siebel) that will provide KPN with "a complete customer view across all products, services, channels and interactions," company officials say.

 

KPN officials hope the CRM foundation will provide the basis for differentiating customer service at all touch points and will deliver enhanced customer insight for cross- and up-selling. The combination of CRM data analysis and enhanced business intelligence is expected to support KPN's customer focused operations.

 

"As we are one of the first customers to deploy the new Oracle eCommunications suite end-to-end, including Siebel CRM and Portal Billing. IBM's experience with other leading clients and the relationship between IBM and Oracle were of great importance to us," said Jan Muchez, CIO of KPN.

 

KPN provides Dutch consumers and consumer households with a range of fixed and mobile telephony, Internet and TV services. Company officials say that the "impact of convergence," driven by technology developments like All-IP and Web 2.0, means that "KPN needs to establish a flexible customer-centric IT infrastructure."

 

So as lead IT services provider, IBM will help KPN with this transformation for Billing, CRM and Business Intelligence. For KPN's current and next generation IP-based services, IBM will establish customer-centric end-to-end billing streets, covering mediation, billing, presentment, collections and revenue assurance.

 

"Customer Centric Billing" must support all KPN's customers for KPN and third party products or services, in any business model for batch and real-time transactions.

 

In April it looked like IBM was counting on its expertise in video gaming to improve its CRM experience. In an article carried by New Zealand Reseller News, industry observer Ben Ames writes that "IBM has a plan to stop the computing delays familiar to users of virtual worlds and online games, simply by adding its Cell gaming chips to its mainframe servers."

 

Nicknamed the "Gameframe," Ames says that in addition to solving "performance problems in delivering rich graphics for the 3D Internet, future versions could handle business applications like ERP, CRM, virtual stores and meeting rooms, collaboration environments, data repositories and mapping."

 

Industry observer Ann Steffora Mutschler writes that IBM officials say it'll be a "blazingly" fast and powerful hybrid platform: "Big Blue said the project leverages the mainframe’s ability to accelerate work via specialty processors, as well as its unique networking architecture, which allows the ultra-fast communication needed to create virtual worlds with millions of simultaneous users sharing a single universe."