Siebel CEO: Analytics biz would have fueled turnaround

Siebel Systems Inc.’s fast-growing analytics business “was going to be my secret ticket back to the promised land,” Siebel Chief Executive Officer (CEO) George Shaheen said Monday in a discussion with journalists, during which he expressed a few pangs of regret over Oracle’s $5.9 billion takeover deal for control of Siebel.

“I don’t think there’s a person on our team that wouldn’t have liked to have a few more quarters to prove our mettle, but I guess we ran out of time or runway,” Shaheen said during a question-and-answer session with reporters at Siebel’s CustomerWorld event in Boston. Shaheen, a long-time Siebel board member, took over as Siebel’s CEO in April, after the company’s abrupt dismissal of Mike Lawrie less than a year into Lawrie’s tenure as the company’s leader.

An Oracle buy-out was on “the very short list of alternatives” Shaheen saw for Siebel as he took over, but the management team’s first choice would have been to restore the company’s viability as an independent vendor, Shaheen said. He singled out Siebel’s analytics business as its hidden gem: “I think our BI [business intelligence] business, our analytics business, was our ticket. I think that is an absolute sleeping giant in our portfolio, and you’re just now beginning to see how far ahead we are.”

Siebel had been under pressure for years to find a new growth engine, after the rapid enterprise CRM (customer relationship management) software sales growth that made it a Wall Street darling in the late 1990s slowed. It has cycled through a number of initiatives company executes hailed at the time as major opportunities to conquer untapped markets, such as its Universal Application Network integration software, whose executive leader defected to SAP AG. Another venture is Siebel’s hosted CRM OnDemand service, which generates lots of buzz is growing, but still trails far behind market leader Salesforce.com Inc. and hasn’t recouped Siebel’s investment. Most recently, the Siebel Component Assembly line was launched on Monday to sell piecemeal technology to customers disinterested in full, packaged CRM applications.

But of all Siebel’s market-expanding ventures, analytics is the one generating significant revenue. Last year, Siebel’s analytics software license revenue grew 44 percent to US$111.6 million, comprising more than 22 percent of the year’s license revenue for Siebel. Meanwhile, Siebel’s license revenue for its core sales, marketing and customer service software dropped 10 percent.

Siebel took the wraps Monday off the latest edition of its Siebel Business Analytics software, version 7.8. The update aims to give users greater self-service functionality, including new visualization and charting tools, deeper formatting and layout control, and more complete exposure of the software’s functionality via Web services. It also introduces a new Microsoft Office Toolbar allowing access to Siebel’s analytics from within Microsoft Excel and other Office software.

Siebel also unveiled a new set of predictive analytics applications, Siebel Real-Time Decisions (RTD). The applications are intended to plug into CRM software from Siebel and other vendors and offer users instant analytical information to assist in upselling, closing deals and providing customer service. The software features multichannel support, “self-learning” features that refine the predictive engine over time, and time-aware models that place greater emphasis on recent customer behavior.

Siebel RTD is shipping now. The company declined to discuss pricing, which varies by customer industry and usage plans.