Houston, Texas – November 10, 2004 — PROS Revenue Management has the longest company history across the Business-to-Business (B2B) price management space. The company is now making strides in its quest to journey beyond the Travel and Transportation industry.

The Bottom Line:

Based on its price optimization and price enforcement capabilities, PROS Revenue Management is a sleeping giant--and one that companies should investigate. After speaking with PROS Revenue Management's management team and looking across the market, we find several strengths and weaknesses to be evident:

Strengths:

• PROS Revenue Management has had over five consecutive years of profitability. It was founded in 1985 and has the longest tenure of companies in the price optimization space.
  
• The company has implemented more than 240 pricing systems across its 100-company customer base--an order of magnitude higher than rival best-of-breed price management companies.
  
• The careful attention to change management as the foundation of its implementations leads to successful customers that are receiving such radical results they are unwilling to be publicly named.
  
• With roughly 200 employees, PROS Revenue Management is able to sustain multiple projects at the same time because of the size of its professional services staff. It tends to perform all of the implementation work itself, and that depth of knowledge is apparent in conversations about the business process and technical difficulties of price management.
  

Weaknesses:

• Although PROS Revenue Management has 30 customers outside of the Travel and Transportation industry, the company remains relatively unknown in the broader B2B price management marketplace.
  
• Its marketing message and sales positioning pushes the importance of its advanced math and optimization science. While this is fundamental to the success of the company, customers are often confused and turned off by the Ph.D.-level sophistication required to interact with the team.
  
• For the next five years, considerable consolidation will take place in the price management market because price management must be tightly integrated with configuration, order management, and demand planning. While PROS is financially stable, acquisition is a real risk that prospects and customers must deal with (as evidenced by the recent PeopleSoft and Oracle acquisition activity).
  

Recommendations:

Those companies that seek to fundamentally change salespeople behavior and transform pricing through price optimization and price enforcement should definitely add PROS Revenue Management to the short list. However, companies that are looking to solve the easy issues in price enforcement without making a seven-figure investment in price management transformation should not select PROS Revenue Management.

 

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PROS Corporate Communications

email: info@prospricing

phone: 713.335.5151 / fax: 713.335.8144