Wall Street expects Baan Co NV’s planned $250m acquisition of sales force automation company Aurum Software Corp to stimulate further consolidation in the customer interaction software (CIS) market (CI No 3,160). There are two key areas of CIS: customer support automation; and sales and marketing automation. Aurum is focused on the latter, which not so much help desk software, but sales force automation applications. Baan’s already scooped up Antalys in the order and configuration management area and Berclain for supply chain management area. It’ll supposedly intergate Aurum applications with Antalys technologies both from a product and organizational perspective. Smith Barney software watchers say Baan competitors including Oracle, PeopleSoft and SAP each have some level of sales force automation and customer management functionality, but don’t believe they are as robust or focused as Baan. Smith Barney’s Andrew Roskill is looking for the major players to provoke further consolidation in these discreet application areas and thinks the CIS market is a likely target, which would propel further acquisitions of both customer support, help desk and sales force automation companies.
