--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CommWeb.com
01/03/02, 2:54 p.m. ET
It's not just about Siebel 7 - they want you to see CRM as a one-stop integrated shop, no matter which vertical industry you're part of.
Since coming out with the latest version of its signature CRM toolkit earlier this fall, Siebel Systems has been very aggressive, trying to seize momentum in a consolidating marketplace. In down economic times, the reasoning goes, there is safety in using tools made by the biggest, most solid company. It's the old IT argument for IBM ("nobody ever got fired for buying IBM") aimed at the call center market.
To buttress that case, the launch of Siebel 7 was accompanied by one of the widest me-too marketing campaigns I've ever seen. There were dozens of announcements in the days following Siebel 7's debut from partnering companies who trumpeted their integration or compatibility with the Siebel's latest. It was clearly an orchestrated move, but the message was clear: the new technology was safe and certified. Anyone who is considering switching to a different CRM toolkit, or buying one for the first time, had to stop and think about what the risks would be in straying from the Siebel bandwagon.
Quickly following that raft of announcements (by about a month), Siebel is now announcing the release of 20 new industry-specific apps that push the product into territory that used to require custom installs and high-priced outside consulting services. They are trying - with a great deal of success - to make the purchase of CRM an integral IT/call center engagement, a truly enterprise-wide endeavor.
Every business likes to think that their internal processes are unique, and require special treatment when they have to hook into a broad-based system like CRM. (Or maybe they don't like to think that, but they think it anyway because that's what they've always thought.) In reality, though, business processes are more automatable and compatible than ever before.
And luckily for Siebel, they have so many installs, and have performed so many industry-specific customizations over the years, that they have a long headstart over their smaller competition in turning those customizations into prefab apps. When they describe their software as having "out-of-the-box" functionality, they're not that far off the mark. They tell me that installation of real, working CRM systems can be done for real enterprises in as short a frame as a couple of weeks. That's a far cry from the six months to a year that was not uncommon in the mid-1990s.
This is actually the fourth iteration of their vertical supplements to the main eBusiness CRM suite. There are 20 apps, seven of which are new in this release. Each Industry Application actually consists of a suite of modular packaged apps that fine tune the core CRM and ERM (employee relationship management) functions for use with the specific processes, analytics, metrics and practices of the vertical sector.
The seven new industries supported are: wireless communications, media, oil and gas, medical products, chemicals, retail and travel/hospitality. Other sectors served that are enhanced in this release, but not newly introduced, include several flavors of financial services, life sciences, consumer goods, industrial production and the public sector.
Clearly, each of these segments has its own way of doing business - and to a certain extent, each even has its own language, customer sensitivities, and measures of success. But they, like all businesses at work today, are all faced with the same basic need to find, retain and coddle a very fickle customer base. Hence, the common underlying infrastructure - the CRM suite - that can be adapted from industry to industry without sacrificing functionality.
Indeed, you can make the argument that over time, the data-based infrastructure of any major company (which would include customer information) has to migrate over into the domain of IT professionals, where it will become much more standardized and turnkey; the tools used to manage customer data should be no more idiosyncratic and customized than tools used to manage network data or word processing information.
Another component that's being added in this version four of the Industry Apps is a tool called Siebel Analytics 7 - a system that comes with prepackaged reports, interactive dashboards and best-practices metrics that cut the data based on the expected needs of different types of corporate users. |
