WHEELHOUSE INTRODUCES SOFTWARE TO HELP HEAL CRM.

At a time when most companies are struggling with CRM, Wheelhouse Corp., has introduced Wheelhouse CRM Director, a software that provides a new way for Fortune 1000 companies to unify disparate systems through the intelligent coordination of enterprise-wide CRM data.

"Over the next five years, companies will spend over $150 billion dollars reinventing sales, marketing, and service to cut costs, grow revenue or change the playing field," said Brian Carty, Wheelhouse president and CEO. "With Wheelhouse CRM Director , we have developed an important enterprise application to address THE major obstacle to getting the return on this investment - managing customer-related data."

Aligning and integrating analytic, operational and legacy CRM systems is a major challenge for IT today. With each new system implementation, business units and channels customize their own business definitions - such as customer, preferences and response - and data schemas to optimize the needs of their systems exclusively. The inability to cohesively manage business definitions across the organization leads to the operational isolation of disparate CRM systems, resulting in increased implementation and system maintenance costs, decreased system quality, and the inability to share data across systems.

"In today's CRM environments, data and process are the collateral damage that result from a singular focus on the application level," said Mary Wardley, director, eCommerce Software and CRM Applications, IDC. "Wheelhouse's CRM Director puts the focus on an important and challenging problem to organizations - the data management issues that result from disparate systems, including CRM systems, and the discrepancy and gaps that exist between them."

Wheelhouse CRM Director enables organizations to reduce CRM implementation time and expense, simplify the ongoing management of their systems, reduce the complexity of the CRM environment and prepare for real-time, multi-channel customer relationship initiatives.

Using Wheelhouse CRM Director, companies can create and manage standardized, reusable business definitions mapped to the different CRM system schemas throughout the organization. These maps are used to direct CRM data movement across systems and are accessible to third-party tools via SOAP and Java APIs. The net result is that companies can finally identify valuable up- sell and cross-sell opportunities across products and business units and coordinate customer service across all channels - all of which adds up to more consistent and profitable customer relationships and increased revenue.

"Through its software, Wheelhouse is solving one of the thorniest problems with CRM - data consistency and management," said Dan Oldis, CRM IT Project Lead, Mazda North America. "Wheelhouse is helping us integrate our CRM and legacy data systems in ways that allow us to use the customer data previously locked in silos to support multi-channel CRM initiatives by simplifying and automating the mapping of diverse business vocabularies."

Unlike ETL tools or standard metadata repositories that do not imbed contextual information about marketing, sales, or service, Wheelhouse CRM Director focuses specifically on the complex needs of CRM. The application is centered on Wheelhouse's unique concept of business definitions, which encapsulate the intellectual property developed through the company's extensive Fortune 1000 customer experience. In addition, Wheelhouse CRM Director does not require companies to retrofit any of their existing system data schemas to match the standard business definitions.

Features & Availability

Wheelhouse CRM Director key features include:

-- vertical-specific templates of business definition sets that jump-start implementations and enable best-practice marketing;

-- a centralized repository with life-cycle version control;

-- XML output used to drive the data movement done by standard data logistics tools.

The client is a feature-rich C++ application supporting Windows 2K, XP, and 98. The server is deployable on Java application servers such as BEA WebLogic, iPlanet, or Tomcat.

Wheelhouse has a strong roster of Fortune 1000 customers, including: Barclays Global Investors, Cablevision Systems Corporation, Cadence Design Systems, Inc., CMP Media, Communications Data Services, Inc. (CDS), Eastman Kodak, First Call, FleetBoston Financial Corp., J.P. Morgan Chase, MassMutual, Mazda, Merrill Lynch, Newsweek, Persumma Financial LLC, RSN Media Network, Spherion, Textron Financial Corporation, Trendwest Resorts, Inc., VoiceStream Wireless, The Washington Post Company and Wells Fargo.

About Wheelhouse

Wheelhouse develops customer relationship management (CRM) integration software that makes CRM work for Fortune 1000 companies. The company's software and specialized services align and integrate legacy, analytic and operational CRM systems, resulting in reduced front office costs and enabling revenue growth. Wheelhouse was incorporated in September 1999 and is financed by leading venture capital firms, global investment banks and strategic corporate investors.

Wheelhouse can be found on the World Wide Web at http://www.wheelhouse.com .

For more information, call 781/505-3000.