Siebel launches component software, delays 8.0 update

Siebel Systems Inc. used its CustomerWorld show this week in Boston to launch a host of product updates and preview forthcoming ones. Among the show’s highlights:

— Siebel went live with Siebel Component Assembly (SCA), formerly Project Nexus, a new line of CRM (customer relationship management) software building blocks aimed at customers that aren’t interested in prepackaged CRM applications. The line’s target market is a small, specialized one: Its typical customer will be a large organization with complex processes and an inclination to build applications itself in-house, said Skip Bacon, Siebel’s vice president of technology. So far, one financial services company has signed on as a customer, and several others are in the pipeline.

SCA deployments cost millions, and Siebel doesn’t expect the line to ever attract a huge customer base. But creating the SCA product was only one goal of the three years’ development work Siebel has put into the project. To develop SCA, Siebel needed to lay an SOA (services oriented architecture) foundation beneath its entire product. That SOA work will benefit all of Siebel’s customers; Siebel has had dozens of engineers from partners such as Microsoft Corp., BEA Systems Inc. and IBM Corp. working in Siebel’s labs to enable deep, standards-based, metadata-driven integration of their software.

At last month’s Oracle OpenWorld conference, Oracle Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Larry Ellison showed little enthusiasm for Siebel’s SCA and implied it would be among the applications lines that will eventually fade from view as Oracle subsumes development on its acquired applications into its forthcoming Fusion line. At Siebel’s show this week, Siebel executives portrayed Ellison’s comments as preliminary remarks made before Ellison was fully briefed on Siebel’s SCA line and SOA strategy.

“I think he has a better handle on that today than perhaps he was able to have at OpenWorld,” Siebel CEO George Shaheen said. Still, he acknowledged, “There’s still a lot of devil in the detail there. I think that is sort of in the category of ‘stay tuned.'”

— Siebel plans to release the next major overhaul of its CRM line, version 8.0, in the second half of 2006. That’s a slightly later date than originally scheduled, but the delay buys time for two major advances, according to Bruce Cleveland, Siebel’s senior vice president of products: a fully Web-services-based architecture and a new user interface that will bring one look-and-feel, based on Siebel’s CRM OnDemand interface, to all of the company’s applications.

“If you want to consume any of the applets or engines that are in the 8.0 product line within an SOA, you can,” Cleveland said. “That sets us up well for the next-generation SCA technology.”

— Siebel updates its hosted CRM OnDemand service’s software every few months, but the next release, version 10, will add a number of significant new features. Users will be able to create custom tables and custom tabs, embedding connections to other Web applications directly within Siebel’s application. The update will also add SAML (Security Assertion Markup Language) single-sign-on functionality. New data management features like batch delete and mass update capabilities and easier list-modification features are aimed at solving administrative headaches.

One customer who viewed a version 10 demo professed herself delighted with the changes. “I was speechless. It’s going to affect every single user complaint that I have heard,” said Ann Miller, manager of IS operations and support services for technology services firm Sarcom Inc. Her company, based in Columbus, Ohio, uses Siebel’s CRM OnDemand for 125 sales employees scattered throughout a dozen nationwide branches.

Miller is particularly excited about version 10’s custom tables and list-modification features. Sarcom went live on Siebel CRM OnDemand in April, and already, the results have been dramatic, she said: Sarcom’s Columbus branch has improved its forecasting accuracy from around 75 percent to 95 percent.

— Oracle’s agreement last month to buy Siebel for US$5.9 billion, a deal expected to close early next year, has left many Siebel customers watchful but not pessimistic. Several OnDemand customers said they don’t anticipate any disruption in the service, while a number of Siebel’s enterprise customers already use Oracle technology in their businesses and are used to working with the company. Even some customers that run their Siebel deployments on IBM’s DB2 database are sanguine: “We also have a lot of large Oracle databases in our business, so we have experience there,” said Sheila Dunn, senior director of CRM technology for UPS Inc. “Both companies understand our needs, and they know we’re demanding. I can’t see that the service they give us would change.”

Siebel executives are publicly putting on a show of enthusiasm about the deal, and some do sound genuinely excited about the opportunity to take change of Oracle’s CRM strategy. Oracle executives have spoken in detail about their strategic vision for their functionally converged Fusion applications portfolio, but the gritty details of how a half-dozen disparate software lines will be melded remain vague. Siebel executives say things will start clearing up as the two companies work through technical briefings.

“I think you could expect that by the end of the year we’ll have a strong understanding of how we’re going to integrate our current products with Oracle’s, and an understanding of the product road maps that lead into Fusion,” Cleveland said.

Still, in private a few Siebel executives are mourning Siebel’s imminent end. One long-time executive who has been to more than a dozen Siebel User Week conferences (the customer show’s former name before it was renamed CustomerWorld this year) lamented that this user conference will be the company’s last. “Even if Oracle has a show and calls it Siebel User Week, it won’t ever be the same,” he said.