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SAN DIEGO—Siebel Systems Inc. CEO Tom Siebel Tuesday laid out his companys “CRM for Everyone” strategy during his afternoon keynote address here at the Siebel User Week 2003 conference.
The strategy is designed to make Siebel CRM applications more pervasive at customer organizations. A key feature of the “CRM for Everyone” strategy is the new Siebel CRM OnDemand hosted-application service that Siebel announced last week with hosting partner IBM.
“Were doubling down on CRM,” Siebel told the crowd. “What part of the CRM market are we interested in? Every part of it.”
Siebel recalled the companys first venture into hosted CRM applications, the 1999 launch of Sales.com.
“We were pioneers in this space, ahead of the rest of the market, but the market wasnt there yet,” Siebel said of the venture that he shuttered in July 2001, nearly two _ years after it was launched. “It looks like the market is here now,” he said, noting that the hosted CRM services business would be a $1 billion market by next year.
“Itll be a nice little business for us,” Siebel said.
He said Siebel CRM OnDemand could scale up to 50,000 users and would cost less than one-tenth of Siebels on-premise software.
“Itll be very functional, theres nothing trivial about it,” Siebel said. “It will have more functionality than we had in our enterprise products not too long ago.”
Siebel CRM OnDemand wont replace licensed software, which will still be the way to go for large implementations with very specific vertical industry needs, he said. But the service will be compatible with Siebels licensed applications and can extend the use of Siebel technology within organiza-tions.
In other news at the show, Siebel announced Version 7.7 of its enterprise CRM suite, due to ship later this quarter. This version adds a number of new features including a customer profile console for retail branch banking, a customer loyalty management application with support for customer segmentation, points and rewards programs; two-way store-and-forward capabilities for users of Siebel Handheld applications; support for service life-cycle management; a role-based user interface and a 39 percent reduction in total cost of ownership from the Siebel 7.5 release.
“I set out to reduce TCO by 50 percent,” said CEO Siebel. “We didnt quite get there, but 39 percent is pretty darn sig-nificant.”
The company also announced the next version of its business intelligence and analytic platform, Siebel Analytics 7.7, with support for integrated data mining and predictive analytics; mobile and disconnected support; full support for Web services; simplified administration, clustering, an improved user interface and integration with other operational workflows.
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