The Dozen 2002Siebel Systems Inc.San Mateo, Calif.Siebel loves to shop. Today, riding the launch of Siebel7, the company can look in the mirror and call itself a provider of "functionally rich, customer-focused e-business applications." But it took a number of acquisitions for the company once merely known as the leading vendor of sales force automation (SFA) applications to get there. In CEO Tom Siebel's vision, SFA was but one orientation of a larger notion of enterprise relationship management — in which businesses build on strong employee, customer, and partner relationships to achieve optimal revenues. On any given day, there's a management consultant in a hotel ballroom somewhere proselytizing that very vision to a bunch of executives dining on chicken with mushroom sauce served with a side of wild rice and vegetables: That's easy. The hard part is spending, according to Siebel, $1 billion in development and thousands of person-years in engineering to integrate the acquisitions and build the new solution around a Web-based architecture. Siebel7 pulls the company up to a new level of breadth and technical sophistication. Competitors, who thought they had Siebel in their sights, are having to take another look. One of the central problems Siebel7 tries to solve is — no surprise — integration, caused by disconnected sales channels, poorly integrated data resources, business processes that don't reflect best practices, and other chaotic realities all too familiar to large organizations. Siebel7 breaks out into customer, employee, and partner relationship management solutions, with domain expertise drawn from Siebel's experiences with customers. Siebel is also launching 20 packaged "Industry Applications" that take Siebel's domain expertise into vertical markets. DATA TURNS THE TIDESiebel touts its natural superiority over CRM solutions coming from ERP vendors, who Siebel feels will never understand how to fit the unstructured, dynamic quality of relationship management into the "deterministic" processes that make up back-office solutions. However, Siebel does share with its fierce competitors the view that analytics are essential; Siebel7 came out of the chutes outfitted with an array of best-of-breed BI solutions. In 2001, Siebel picked up nQuire Software Inc., a pioneer of data integration and "just-in-time" intelligence. Siebel will blend nQuire's technology within its Smart Web Architecture, which moves beyond what Siebel derides as "dumb client" standard HTTP solutions. The synergy between Smart Web and nQuire's dynamic approach to accessing multiple data warehouses should produce some exciting solutions that will step up the intelligence of relationship management. That fits Siebel's grand vision, one increasingly shared by organizations determined to find the secret to the next wave of prosperity. MAJOR MOVES IN 2001· Released Siebel7, a major upgrade of the company's e-business application suite · Acquired nQuire Software · Introduced Siebel Solutions for Homeland Security, focused on the needs of law enforcement and government agencies CLASSIC CUSTOMERS· Bayer AG's global life sciences group uses Siebel to establish a single, comprehensive, and realtime view of customer relationships · Kemper Insurance Companies created a single view of the customer with Siebel applications, enabling call-center staff to dramatically improve customer service
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