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To: mtnlady who wrote (17444)	2/7/2000 8:54:00 PM
From: Mike Buckley	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 54805

CRM: Tornado or Main Street? mtnlady, I think we are on main street now Mike. Siebel is looking for variations/niches to CRM they can migrate into and CRM is going out into the main stream in book form. This, like all aspects of the technology adoption lifecycle, is not easy to define. I think those niches you speak of continue to be holdovers from the bowling alley phase. Even the authors mention on page 279 of TRFM (updated less than a year ago) that "As of this writing the front office space appears to be in the early throes [my emphasis] of a tornado, where customer service and telesales applications have witnessed very fast growth. Mobile sales force automation, a trickier application to implement both technically and culturally, is in our view still in the bowling alley." The CRM total suite is still so much in the early stages of the tornado that marketing automation and channel management automation is being added and bolstered as we speak, ummm, write. As the authors also mention on page 279, "the rise of the customer-facing CRM technologies will keep Siebel and all of the other CRM vendors busy building an 'all-facing' integrated CRM suite for them." I don't think the product is on Main Street yet. Hypergrowth isn't slowing. The company continues to go after market share, not margin share. Those are classic symptoms of the tornado. I think the issue that is adding to the confusion is that the issues of Web enablement and e-commerce based solutions are changing the landscape so rapidly that it might appear that Siebel is branching out. Instead of branching out, Siebel is simply reinventing its product, making it whole so it fits in the Web-based world of e-commerce. What we're seeing is the tornado of the "traditional" CRM space morphing into the tornado of the customer-facing, Web-enabed, e-commerce-based CRM tornado. Just my opinion. --Mike Buckley