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

To: Mike Buckley who wrote (4214)	1/4/2001 7:56:27 AM
From: Boplicity	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 6974

Good Morning Mike, I have question for you. What's your take on the rate reduction and the market going forward? Also, how do you plan to play it? Greg

To: Mike Buckley who wrote (4214)	1/5/2001 10:11:31 AM
From: Allegoria	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 6974

Hello Mike & Thread- I promised myself to stop posting in 2001, but I still feel the need to engage in critical analysis of my investments. In an attempt to analyze what I perceive as an important risk to Siebel (SEBL), could we discuss the following? Over and over I have noticed that one area of management software that SEBL has shunned is enterprise resource planning (ERP). Perhaps for good reasoning: "Growth in the ERP market will be flat to down for 1999," says Thomas Berquist, a senior analyst at the investment bank U.S. Bancorp Piper Jaffray. The director of sales products at Siebel says: "We remain unswervingly focused on the front office," Its no wonder for this singular focus, since research firms like AMR Research predict that CRM licensing revenues will approximate $7.5 billion in 2002, representing a growth rate of more than 58 percent from 1997. But perhaps this singular focus also represents a crucial risk to SEBL. "Vendors whose software completely integrates the front-office enterprise with the back office will be the most successful in the years ahead" says Michael Bernstein of the Gartner Group. "Businesses know that without capturing data from sales and service channels and linking it to the back office, they'll be leaving a lot of potential revenues on the table. CRM companies need to help businesses consolidate their data." Others suggest a split in the CRM market which raises serious concerns to SEBL investors. Is it possible or likely that pure play CRM vendors such as SEBL will evolve into serving niche markets (albeit still large markets), such as those industries without supply chains? Is this singular focus on CRM going to allow the ERP companies such as Oracle (ORCL), PeopleSoft (PSFT), (SAP) and others to win the portion of the front-office market represented by their traditional customer base? As discussed on this thread before, ORCL has already introduced a viable CRM/ERP software suite. We can expect that SEBL will continue to experience increased competition in the CRM arena from the companies mentioned above. These companies are the acknowledged masters of ERP and the need for such integrated software suites seems to favor the ERP vendors selling CRM to manufacturers. As always, your thoughts are appreciated. Good luck, Eric