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CRM upstart Salesforce.com has nabbed another executive from customer relationship management software market leader Siebel Systems Inc.
San Francisco-based Salesforce.com, which sells CRM and sales force automation software as a hosted service, on Monday will announce that it has hired Dave Orrico to be its senior vice president and general manager of Americas. He will lead all sales, revenue-generating and customer-facing activities for the region.
Orrico comes from Siebel, of San Mateo, Calif., where he was vice president of Eastern operations, Canada and Latin America. He spent seven years in various sales positions at Siebel.
Orrico is the fourth former Siebel executive to join Salesforce.com.
Craig Ramsey, who was executive vice president of worldwide sales for Siebel and worked with Oracle Corp. before that, joined Salesforce.coms board of directors in April. Brett Queener recently joined Salesforce.com to run its field marketing organization; he held a similar post at Siebel.
Steve Garnett helped build Siebels European business and was in charge of alliances when he left the company a year ago. He worked for Oracle before that. Last month Garnett joined Salesforce.com to head up its operations in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
Siebel was founded in 1993 and is the acknowledged leader in the CRM market with $333 million in sales in its most recent quarter. But the company, which is known for long and complex software rollouts, was forced to cut 9 percent of its work force because of declining revenues.
Salesforce.com, meanwhile, was founded in 1999 and claims 6,900 customers with 94,000 end users. Its business model is very different from Siebels. It hosts its own software and lets users access personalized applications via a Web browser. It is sold with a monthly subscription fee rather than an upfront license and annual maintenance fee.
Garnett said that this different business model will be more attractive to companies going forward.
Siebel “will make sense for the large enterprise…[but] were seeing a turn in the market where most companies are very risk averse” with regard to large software deployments, he said. Siebel is “not going to sign up $20 million projects anymore. The projects of 1999/2000 arent coming back anymore.
“Salesforce was a very very compelling business case to deliver benefits without the risk,” Garnett continued. “I wasnt expecting to see half the things I found.”
Garnett scoffed at the suggestion that the group of new Salesforce.com executives may have been on their way out at Siebel as a result of that companys cost cutting.
“Not one of them would have appeared on a downsizing list,” Garnett said. “You dont get rid of your best people.”