RE: Siebel's Interview....
I'm sure it has been posted, but for all gorilla gamers this is a must read article with Tom Siebel. Encouraging to me was that Oracle saw very sluggish sales in Europe. Seibel is on fire in Europe in terms of sales. As a resident of Europe coming from America, I can attest to the fact that customer service in Europe has enough room to grow from ground zero. I remember well one of my first meals here years ago when I told the waiter that my red wine did not taste very good and that I would like to try something else. He took a swig of my wine, said it tasted fine to him and walked off. End of discussion. That type of service has permeated customer service - in a broad general scope - far too long here in Europe from the top to the bottom. Siebel is tapping into that on the corporate level and letting the CEO's know what is at stake in the global market place.
This is page 2 of the interview, but I assume the technically challenged will be able to find page 1. I begin with page 2 because it has the most gorilla game information on it:
upside.com
Okay, I'll take pity and help you, here's page one:
upside.com
A couple of highlights:
Question: You're off to Europe tomorrow. What's going on there?
Siebel: Europe has been turned upside down -- it's our fastest-growing market. Companies used to operate within geopolitical boundaries, but now the language barriers are gone, currency barriers are gone, trade barriers are gone. Competing for the telecommunications client in Munich is no longer just Deutsche Telekom (DT). Standing in line to steal the customer is Omnitel, MCI (MCIC.SI), Nokia (NOK), British Telecom (BTY), and AT&T (T). The CEO lives or dies based on meeting his numbers. All of a sudden, identifying this customer and keeping this customer happy is a real important thing to him because if he doesn't do it, he loses his job. We're not preaching the importance of sales, marketing, and customer service - they're sold.
(skip)
Question: Let's look at the competitors for the quarter:
Siebel: There were 440 deals, and who did I compete with on them? We saw Oracle 3 percent of the time, Clarify (CLFY) 10 percent, SAP 3 percent, Vantive (VNTV) 11 percent-that's the most we competed against anyone. The good news from our perspective is that Oracle didn't buy Clarify [Nortel Networks (NT) did]. If Oracle had bought Clarify, that could have caused us some trouble.
Here's the one I enjoyed the most as a reader of "Inside the Tornado" and "The Gorilla Game" in terms of application to one's business in the dynamic technology arena based on horizontal/vertical market strategy:
Question: Is it a question of focus?
Siebel: It's a question of focus and core competence. SAP is foremost at manufacturing. There are few people in the world who could go toe-to-toe with Hasso Platner on this subject. But are they experts at sales, marketing, and customer service? They don't even have a word for" "customer service" in Germany, for God's sake. What is Oracle's core competency? It's databases. What would happen if we decided to go into the relational database business? We would walk into a buzzsaw. If we went into manufacturing software, it would be like walking into a sledgehammer. We would get chewed up and spit out. Because it's not a core competency for us. I would suggest to you that they're coming into our space is a similar phenomenon.
The whole article is worth the read.
BB |
