Siebel expands its scope

Siebel Systems is setting its sights beyond CRM, landing a banking software acquisition and an alliance with analytics vendor Teradata. Siebel last week also released a major update to its Siebel 7 product line.

Siebel paid $70 million in cash for Dublin, Ireland-based banking software maker Eontec. Siebel plans to use Eontec’s software to expand its presence in the banking industry beyond just CRM and analytics to instead provide a full set of sales, service, and transactional applications. Eontec’s 140 employees will join Siebel’s retail finance division, now led by Eontec’s former CEO, Patrick Brazel.

Analysts and investors have pushed Siebel to look beyond the CRM market it dominates, where growth has slowed. In the market for banking infrastructure software, competitors include Fidelity National Financial, which provides technology systems and services to institutions that outsource those functions, and S1, which sells multichannel financial services applications.

Siebel also released Siebel 7.7, a major update of the Siebel 7 product line. Reducing ownerships costs was Siebel’s major goal with the release. Executives said Siebel 7.7’s improvements in scalability, integration, deployment, and upgrade features make the release as much as 40 percent less expensive to run than Siebel’s initial 7.0 software release.

Siebel 7.7 also includes tailored enhancements and new modules within several of its industry-specific versions, including its automotive, consumer goods, financial services, high-tech and industrial manufacturing, life sciences, public sector, and retail software sets.

Ramping up its existing analytics applications, Siebel has teamed up with NCR’s Teradata division. As part of the alliance, Siebel and Teradata will work to optimize Siebel’s 150 analytics applications for use with Teradata’s data warehouse, allowing joint customers to mine their stored data more easily and in greater detail.

Integration of the companies’ software is now being tested with initial customers and will be generally available this summer, Siebel said.

Siebel rival PeopleSoft, meanwhile, has made its EnterpriseOne Rapid Start program available on the Intel platform.

The solution includes PeopleSoft’s Accelerated Implementations framework of applications, middleware, database, and hardware. According to Steve Maegdlin, vice president of product marketing for EnterpriseOne at PeopleSoft, the framework is designed for fast deployments of PeopleSoft applications and reduced TCO.

The latest package combines existing PeopleSoft capabilities with acquired education services from J.D. Edwards, Maegdlin said. “Bringing the two together has taken Rapid Start to a new level,” he said.