Model N launches revenue management suite

Taking a cue from major enterprise software vendors such as SAP and Siebel, who are hyping their integration platforms, revenue management vendor Model N will unveil the Model N Technology Platform and Revenue Management Suite that features preintegrated applications.

Unlike SAPs NetWeaver and Siebel’s UAN, which are designed to act as glue for disparate application components, Model N’s platform is designed from the ground up with a single set of shared services.

The first instance of the suite is a vertical solution for the pharmaceutical industry. However, Steve Zocchi, vice president of marketing at Model N, said there is no reason why the same platform could not be created for other industries.

“We had the vision of building a layer that sat above the application server and databases and messaging middleware and provided a set of tools and shared services to build Web-based applications that could integrate people, processes, and information,” said Zocchi.

The new suite of applications includes pricing strategy, pricing execution, government pricing, contract management, chargebacks, and other applications. These applications use the same pricing and workflow engines, catalog and community management, document management, reporting and data management services.

Ron Calderone, CIO of Reliant Pharmaceutical, said Reliant looked at solutions from SAP and iMany but chose Model N.

“SAP acquired IDS for price management but IDS was not fully integrated with the SAP suite and iMany kept bolting on one module after another and the integration was not there up front,” Calderone said.

Colin Masson, research director at AMR Research said that while the big ERP vendors address the price-execution component of price management, other parts of price management are not addressed.

“Price optimization is outside of their domain. What Model N is doing is new in trying to put a more holistic view into price management across all areas,” Masson said.

The Revenue Management Suite will be available in the second quarter.