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Strategies & Market Trends : Gorilla and King Portfolio Candidates -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Apollo who wrote (3304)	6/30/1999 8:07:00 PM
From: Mike Buckley	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 54805

THE FRONT OFFICE GORILLA GAME This Month in the Front Office -- Part 1 Since a meeting with the air conditioner repairman got me home early today, I'm taking advantage of it to do my end-of-month report now instead of waiting for the weekend. The News Clarify announced this week that Nortel's deployment of eFrontOffice has resulted in a 350% improved resolution of customer inquiries. Prior to the days of using eFrontOffice, only 20% of customer inquiries resulted in initial contact with an engineer. Now, 90% of the initial contacts are with an engineer, allowing much quicker resolution of problems and increased customer satisfaction. That's one example of what the front office biz is all about. Arthur Andersen Consulting is now a "premier partner" in Siebel's program. I haven't done the research about this, but I had remembered that Andersen already had a representative on Siebel's board. If I'm right about that, I'm surprised Andersen wasn't already a premier partner. If I'm misremembering about Andersen being on Siebel's board, and if they are instead on a competitor's board, that makes the situation even more interesting. Can anyone fill in the blanks of my memory? Siebel announced a sale to FirstEnergy, a large electric utility. I rarely mention press releases about a sale of product and only do so when I see something signifcant that goes beyond the issue of just another sale being made. In this case, the deployment of Siebel Utilities 99 at FirstEnergy indicates another pin in the bowling alley being knocked down. The utilities have not been strong in the adoption of front office software. The deregulation of electric utilities and the federal mandate that they buy and sell power from each other is an attempt to ensure greater competition inuring to the benefit of the users of electric power. Utilities are and will be competing in a way they've never had to in the past. They just might be able to make great use of front office software. Remedy's Customer Support is available with a Rapid Results option that, for slightly less than $50,000, guarantees the customer implementation and configuration in no more than five days and three days of training and technical support. The same option has been available for their Help Desk module for about a year, with 60 imlementations successfully completed. It's not news that Remedy has been providing integration software to link Oracle's applications software with Remedy's software. It is news that it's now also available for SAP's R/3 Service Management Module. Starting July 15, Siebel99 will include Microsoft's SQL Server 7.0. Buying the two in the package will be less expensive than buying them separately. Microsoft will provide the support for the server software. Engineers from the two companies working together at the Joint Technology Solution Center will ensure integration and optimization of future versions of the apps and server software. Considering that Thomas Siebel said a month or so ago that Larry Ellison was hurting his own business by not being more cooperative in the front office segment, we shouldn't be surprised that Siebel Systems continues to run with Microsoft's SQL Server. And we shouldn't be surprised that the partnership allows current users of Oracle's database to buy an "upgrade" license to migrate to SQL Server. The war between Siebel and Ellison continues, and I'm not sure it's not to the detriment of both companies. And if you think the news is exciting :), wait 'til you see the stuff about the stocks! Click to my next post (Part 2) which is published in a different font, allowing the columns of numbers to appear as they should. --Mike Buckley