Onyx adds BPM technology

Customer relationship management (CRM) vendor Onyx is buying business process management (BPM) technologies from Visuale in a deal worth $4m.

Onyx chief financial officer Brian Henry explained that the company will use the rules and processes-informed technology developed by Visuale to help reduce implementation costs by delivering predefined rules packs.

"Onyx is moving to a process-centric way of looking at CRM so we have announced the acquisition as a way of infusing our CRM application with business process modelling capabilities," he said.

"Some of our very large customers have already been building additional modules on their Onyx platform.

"A tool would make Onyx more compelling by covering user-specific needs such as referral management and the need for regulatory compliance to run processes across organisational boundaries."

Onyx claimed that the technology will allow non-technical users to design and modify business processes using graphical workflow and business rule design tools.

The technology can support long-running, multi-user work flows that in some cases extend beyond the walls of the organisation to partners and suppliers.

Visuale BPM is built on Microsoft .Net standards and supports Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle databases.

Onyx chief executive Brent Frei told vnunet.com that the company expected to bring products to market which integrate Visuale technology within the next six months.

Mike Davies, senior research analyst at Butler Group, said: "This is a very logical extension to Onyx's product offerings.

"Traditional CRM solutions have, on one level, become silos. A process-centric approach to CRM can only be a good thing."