>I saw Siebel present at a conference today. Howard Graham, CFO, made an interesting comment. He said it's perplexing how Oracle can be doing so well in CRM ($31m in most recent quarter and $41m in May Q). Siebel is competing against ORCL in maybe 4 of 100 deals currently and Graham says Clarify claims not to see much of ORCL either.<
turs.
you might get a kick out of this excerpt from an interview with oracle CFO jeff henley. given ellison's ability to speak from his sphincter, my guess is that he taught henley to 'whistle' from both sides of his mouth.
cheers,
-chris.
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September 14, 1999 9:31pm
Q&A: Oracle CFO Jeff Henley
By Sergio G. Non
ZDII
ZDII: The other field I'm wondering about is CRM (customer relationship management) software. Oracle continues to see a rapid growth there, and yet if you talk to Siebel or Vantive or someone like that, they keep saying they don't see Oracle in their contract competitions. Why do you think that is?
Henley: Well, I think, first of all, there's a lot of truth to it. I think the other thing is that they really frankly don't want to acknowledge us. I think that they're a little bit in denial.
But I think that the reality is that we are new to CRM, it's a big market, there's a lot of growth, and I think that there's a lot of growth that we'll all get for awhile. So in a new market, there's a number of people who do well. We saw that in our database business years ago, a lot of our competitors, like us, grew nicely. I think that's the truth of it: we're not competing that heavily with lots of people.
As the market starts to mature, as we all get bigger, then I think you'll see a lot more competition. But we are definitely starting to engage in certain areas against these various guys, and they'll deny this for awhile. But if we keep posting triple digit growth every quarter, eventually I suspect they'll sing a little different tune.
for the complete interview:
zdii.com |
