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Technology Stocks : Siebel Systems (SEBL) - strong buy? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lee L. who wrote (3071)	10/19/1999 4:14:00 PM
From: Turs	Read Replies (6) \| Respond to of 6974

What's the board's take on this spate of deals by hardware vendors to buy call center/customer interaction software firms? CSCO-WebLine, Alcatel-Genesys, Nortel-Clarify. I bet Vantive is kicking itself - I'm sure Lucent would have paid a bigger premium than Peoplesoft and they wouldn't have gone down a sinkhole either. Anyway, does this impact Siebel's ability to spread into other customer-centric software areas? Or is the SFA space large enough to support growth for a long time?

To: Lee L. who wrote (3071)	11/12/1999 1:41:00 PM
From: Beltropolis Boy	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 6974

>When Tom brought in x-big-guns from SAP and others several months ago, I felt a lot better about the Siebel organization. The home-grown team was ok, but not ready for the big leagues IMO. I'm no longer working with Siebel ...< were you counting down the days till fully vested? i think i could deal with daily coat & tie and no lunching in my veal-fattening pen (read: cube) for 50k shares. according to SAP's head teuton, anyway. eurotrash girl gets a makeover ... ----- Technology News SAP Details CRM Plans 11/09/99, 7:29 p.m. ET By Jeff Sweat, Information Week techweb.com SAP, one of the best-known enterprise resource vendors, said its identity will begin to change as it pushes into customer-relationship management (CRM). "CRM will become our major driver for business revenue," SAP chairman Hasso Plattner said Tuesday at a briefing on SAP's front-office strategy. It's a heady statement for the company, whose forays into CRM over the past year have been troubled at best, with significant delays in application delivery. Yet the company said it will be rolling out what it deems to be crucial front-office components next month and will round out its basic CRM suite by early next year. On Dec. 15, the company will ship a telesales application, as well an Internet portal that pulls customer information from multiple sources, including R/3 systems and third-party applications. But a marketing-campaign management application, also expected this year, will not ship until the second quarter of 2000. Plattner, while hesitating to put an official number on the company's planned growth in the front-office market, said he believed it would hit $200 million in revenue for CRM and related projects. That's a conservative estimate, he added. The market will continue to grow, he said, because while most businesses have operational transactions well in hand, they're only now learning to use technology to serve and sell to customers. Some analysts said SAP, with tight integration between customer-facing Internet applications and back-office data, is delivering on capabilities that other front-office vendors are not. "It's tying the front end to the back end so you can actually commit to deliver what you sell," said Alice Greene, president of IT consulting firm Industry Directions. In particular, she said, SAP is integrating online store applications with SAP's Business Warehouse and advanced planning and optimization supply-chain applications, so customers will know the exact status of goods and orders. SAP is also offering traditional applications, including mobile sales. But other analysts see SAP's strategy differently. SAP is taking CRM in a slightly different direction, said Steve Bonadio, an analyst at Stamford, Conn-based Meta Group. "They're reshaping CRM into what SAP thinks CRM is," he said. "But other than mobile sales, it's not CRM in any traditional sense of the word." Plattner sounded off on a couple of issues that have trailed the company recently, including its Monday lawsuit against Siebel Systems for competitive hiring practices. Plattner declined specific comments because the suit is pending, but did indicate that Siebel was able to offer SAP's executives roughly $200 million worth of stock options to lure them to the front-office vendor, something SAP can't match because of its German background. Offering large numbers of shares to employees "is common practice in Silicon Valley, but it's not in Europe," Plattner said. "I would have lost my job at the next shareholder meeting ... I cannot give a middle-management person 50,000 shares."