There was lots of discussion about that in the conference call, noted below.
Did you forget to include comments on this discussion?
I did manage to read the report and while it is hardly a positive one, I do have to say that the standards adhered to by analyst reports sure make a scientist wince. CRM, even more that some other kinds of software, requires a lot of competent configuration and fitting to the business process to work at its best and it seems clear that not every Siebel customer gets that, but it seems to me that the fault lies more with Siebel's consulting partners (painful personal experience) or with unrealistic expectations on the part of customer management.
Apparently 27% of an IT budget is spent on integrating applications.
Market evaluations of EAI specifically show that currently only 1% of the total expenditure is on software ... all the rest is custom labor. There is huge potential for tools here, although most of the tools addressing this space, except for the ones specific to a given software package, seem to be not going anywhere much. They sell, but they don't take over the world as one would expect. I think the barrier here is partly technical, but also partly cultural. The one time Forte Fusion, now Sun's iIS, was an incredibly good technical solution and is a money maker, but it sure isn't taking over the world.
One of the significant enhancements in 7.5 is a plug-in for I.E. which is supposed to dramatically improve client performance. This could be a lot more significant than such a simple thing seems since there has been a lot of dissatisfaction with the client performance of the 7.0 browser client, despite the huge advantage of a zero footprint install. |
