Siebel Component Assembly breaks up CRM for deployment on BEA WebLogic Server 9.0 Ever since the web services trend gathered steam, enterprise application vendors, beginning with SAP, have promised to componentize their sprawling ERP, CRM, and SCM (supply chain management) offerings into services that can be deployed individually on app servers — potentially increasing deployment flexibility and reducing the hassle of big-bang upgrades. Last week, Siebel Systems took a stride in that direction by shipping a version of its Siebel Component Assembly product for deployment on BEA WebLogic Server 9.0.Siebel’s move comes on the heels of SAP’s Analyst Summit in Las Vegas, where SAP described an accelerated initiative to componentize its applications as services running on the NetWeaver app server. Analyst Frank Gens of IDC, who attended the Summit, blogged that the initiative is now soaking up one half of SAP’s R&D dollars and that SAP has “implemented roughly 300 services; by the end of 2006, that number will be in the low thousands — about 10 percent of what will ultimately be a repository of about 30,000 services.”Oracle and its Project Fusion appear to be headed in the same general direction, the ultimate goal being a common middleware infrastructure for its Oracle eBusiness, PeopleSoft, and JD Edwards offerings. Even IBM has gotten in on the act, with an announcement last May that Lawson Software, a second-tier ERP vendor, planned to ship componentized versions of its financial, SCM, and human resources software to run on WebSphere. Software DevelopmentTechnology IndustryDatabasesSmall and Medium Business