PeopleSoft VP sees gains against Siebel
Monday December 9, 12:02 am ET
By Lisa Baertlein
PALO ALTO, Calif., Dec 9 (Reuters) - The PeopleSoft Inc.(NasdaqNM:PSFT - News) executive in charge of software that manages sales, customer service and marketing sees his company gaining on Siebel Systems Inc.(NasdaqNM:SEBL - News), the leader in that sector.
"We're going to continue to grow and continue to take market share from Siebel," Joseph Davis, PeopleSoft's vice president and general manager for customer relationship management software told Reuters as the company launched the latest version of its CRM software on Monday.
Many industry and financial analysts agree that PeopleSoft is the No. 2 CRM vendor in terms of software functionality, but there is wide disagreement as to PeopleSoft's rank behind Siebel in terms of sales.
On both fronts, PeopleSoft most closely competes with fellow business-automation software makers SAP AG (XETRA:SAPG.DE - News) and Oracle Corp. (NasdaqNM:ORCL - News), who also sell programs to manage such things as accounting, purchasing and human resources.
Davis, who joined the company in June, said PeopleSoft's latest CRM update is one of the biggest yet in terms of functions and industry-specific offerings. The new software, CRM 8.8, also is easier to install and use, he said.
REVENUE BATTLE
Scores of CRM vendors sprang up during the venture capital-fueled technology boom of the late 1990s. Davis said competition from such start-ups has been thinning as customers worry about the viability of those small software shops, many of which remain unprofitable and have depleted, or are running low on, hard-to-find capital.
"There are only three players to look at ... It's SAP, Siebel and ourselves in this space," Davis said, predicting that SAP and PeopleSoft will continue to make gains while Siebel will slip.
Siebel sales have stalled in recent quarters as the big CRM deals it grew up on have been choked out by a long drought in corporate technology spending. Nevertheless, the company remains the undisputed king of CRM. It does more sales, its software is more feature-rich, and it has products for far more specific industries than its newer rivals.
Silicon Valley-based Siebel posted CRM license sales of $127 million in the third quarter.
SAP -- which reports CRM revenues that are hotly disputed by competitors and analysts -- said its third-quarter CRM sales were 93 million euros, or about $93.9 million at current conversion rates.
PeopleSoft said its total third-quarter software license revenues were $122 million. The company does not break out its CRM revenues.
Pat Walravens, who covers Siebel and PeopleSoft for JMP Securities in San Francisco, said PeopleSoft last broke out its revenue mix in the second quarter of 2000. At that time, the company said CRM accounted for about 25 percent of software license sales.
"I think their revenue mix has shifted more toward CRM. They have been relatively successful with their efforts," said Walravens, who puts PeopleSoft in third place in terms of CRM revenues.
Wedbush Morgan analyst Nathan Schneiderman said PeopleSoft is making progress against Siebel, but questioned whether the company would be able to unseat the sector's most dominant player.
He noted that Siebel has far more CRM customers than its competitors, and said many of those customers rank among the world's biggest companies.
"If you want to make the argument that Siebel is going to fade significantly, customers would have to rip out Siebel and put in SAP, PeopleSoft or Oracle, and I don't see that happening," Schneiderman said. |
