Analytics Anywhere

Siebel Shifts The BI Balance

Siebel Systems Inc. is not complacent. The company is actively working to hold onto its strong position in the enterprise software market. Trying to stay ahead of a business world that values deep and broad integration supporting actionable analytics, Siebel announced its acquisition of privately held nQuire Software Inc. in October.

On the heels of this acquisition announcement came publication of an AMR Research Inc. report concluding that ERP vendors, such as PeopleSoft Inc., SAP AG, and Oracle, now pose a threat to Siebel's status as the top CRM vendor. The reason: Businesses want to integrate back-office transactional systems into their CRM systems. If you're already a SAP shop, for example, buying CRM from SAP is likely to simplify your integration task.

Daniel Lackner, VP and general manager of Siebel's Marketing Automation and E-Business Analytics division, believes that nQuire's technology will neutralize any integration challenge that ERP vendors may now pose.

"The nQuire technology," Lackner said, "has a proven capability of interfacing with back-end systems, ERP systems, legacy systems, and front-office systems."

Lackner said he expects no change to current software alliances between Siebel and other BI companies. The nQuire Server, he explains, essentially appears to an interfaced application like an ODBC-compliant data source (although it serves data from any number of disparate systems). An AlphaBlox Corp. or Business Objects SA system, for instance, can then perform its functions on that data. DataDistilleries B.V., a CRM analytics vendor, is among those partnerships key to the analytics strategy.

Siebel opted to acquire nQuire rather than form an original equipment manufacture (OEM) relationship because, Lackner explained, Siebel wanted the "intimacy" of product fusion that comes from in-house engineering.

NQuire founder and CEO Larry Barbetta, who will head the new Siebel Analytics division, said the companies' vision is to bring to market "a set of prebuilt analytical applications to complement the Siebel product family ... for sales, service, partner relationship, marketing, employee relationship, [and so on]," something neither company could accomplish alone.

Furthermore, Barbetta said, Siebel calls its strategy "analytics everywhere," with "everywhere" referring not just to the Siebel product line and a broad scope of users, but also to all enterprise and partner systems beyond the enterprise.

So then, could the rumors about Siebel considering the acquisition of i2 Technologies Inc. — or, more generally, expanding into domains such as supply chain management — be true? Neither Barbetta nor Lackner will comment. An October AMR Research Alert concluded that it is unlikely Siebel will acquire i2 because the price would be too high.

A version of Siebel 7 with nQuire Server will ship at the end of 2001.

— Jeanette Burriesci

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