SLM Space Continues to Percolate

AMR, META chime in with views on leaders in service lifecycle management niches

Mesa, AZ — June 25, 2003 — Service lifecycle management players issued dueling press releases over the past week, citing reports from technology analyst firms touting their respective strengths.

Atlanta-based Servigistics claimed the leadership position in the emerging spare parts planning (SPP) industry based on a study put out by META Group.

"We believe that during 2003/04 a philosophical shift from centralized to collaborative and distributed service parts planning (SPP) will transfer best-of-breed leadership from Xelus to Servigistics," said Dwight Klappich of META.

Klappich said that while Xelus remains the largest SPP-focused vendor, with the greatest total SPP-related revenues and numbers of customers, Servigistics, though smaller, has equivalent SPP functionality and likely will gain momentum, principally due to its more contemporary J2EE application architecture.

"Companies considering collaborative/distributed planning and/or those that intend to support a true global deployment will find Servigistics' Web-based architecture better suited to these needs than Xelus's more traditional client/server technology," Klappich asserted.

Meanwhile, an AMR Research study highlighted Astea International as a leader among best-of-breed field service management solution providers in an alert published June 5, 2003.

In the alert, entitled "Evaluating Field Service: Look Beyond Service Order Management," AMR analysts Marc McCluskey and Rod Johnson cited Astea for its "broad functionality, partnerships and support of devices."

The alert notes: "When evaluating field service applications, users need to look beyond basic service order execution and consider how the applications will support revenue generation and deeper integration across financial, supply chain and product development processes."

The analysts go on to say that Astea "takes the top seat with the release of Alliance Suite, which offers the functionality required to support service lifecycle management ... Astea's suite is the most complete in supporting CRM needs."

For more information on solutions for the service and support chain, see the articles "In the Field and All Grown Up," the Net Best Thing column in the June/July 2002 issue of iSource Business, and "Time to Prove It," the Net Best Thing column in the April/May 2003 issue of iSource Business.