One thing has become clear while digesting Siebel’s onslaught of news this week. Siebel is practicing what it preaches with its CRM message, and listening to its customers. Here’s some examples:* Customers are traditionally nervous about moving to a new application platform without clear knowledge of its roadmap. Answer: Siebel Version 7 – in both its CRM and Analytics suits – will be around for the next decade, Tom Siebel said yesterday. * Customers are sick of long implementation times, and high ongoing costs. Answer: Siebel has swallowed its pride and rolled out OnDemand take its hosted competitors head on. If indeed customers start buying hosted CRM on the basis of feature and not cost and implementation time, Siebel has a very deep set of features its can progressively switch on.* Customers will no longer tolerate proprietary software. Answer: Siebel Executive Vice President David Schmaier said during his keynote address this morning that the company will continue to support a raft of Web services, and both the J2EE and .Net platforms. “More and more over time you will see that every single product that we ship here at Siebel systems will be build on top of these platforms,” he said. * The Universal Application Network architecture is widely misunderstood and customers have questioned why they need yet another integration platform. Answer: Siebel is working on this one by adding support for BEA WebLogic, IBM’s WebSphere and Microsoft’s BizTalk. Having big friends come to the party is the first step in reassuring customers there are significant engineering resources on tap. The next job is communicating how this applications-layer platform can comfortably sit above these various platforms and reduce development time by offering pre-packaged, vertical-industry business processes. * Customers are looking at hosted CRM offerings and looking for more analytics and BI capabilities. Answer: Larry Barbetta, Group VP and GM of Siebel Analytics, officially launched Siebel Analytics 7.7 today, and mentioned in passing the small, but important fact that most of its components are available as part of OnDemand. That’s going to be a big competitive weapon to use against Salesforce et al.Of course, it’s is still early days for many of these product offerings, but as the Analytics example shows, Siebel can acquire a company like nQuire, and just two years later turn it into what IDC now reports is the industry’s largest analytics business (SAS Institute, look out). Technology Industry