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

To: Kevin Rose who wrote (1476)	5/4/1998 2:22:00 PM
From: Shege Dambanza	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 6974

You know, you're just going to have to stop being so rational on this thread. There are people here (and I'm not mentioning any names, Melissa) that will be all over your case. After all, Tom Siebel surely considered all these risks before breakfast. :-) I agree with your assessment, especially the risks around D. All the Scopus installations I've seen (and I've seen quite a few) involve a fair bit of customization, from simple things like configuation to complex ones like screen and schema changes. And a number of them also have money sunk into integrations with other apps. It's going to be expensive to upgrade/change to what new integrated product SEBL/SCOP come up with. Of course you may not relate to this in as much as you work at Clarify, where ease-of-upgrade is a way of life. Not! :-)

To: Kevin Rose who wrote (1476)	5/4/1998 6:06:00 PM
From: Melissa McAuliffe	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 6974

Kevin, >>Thus, the upgrade to the new products must not only be complete and seamless, but nearly instantaneous. Is this something new....an instantaneous upgrade?? Whatever happened to testing and parallel processing? You don't just turn off one product and turn the other one on without doing this, do you? >> It leaves the door open for other vendors to re-enter; why not do a reevaluation of vendors if you have to start over anyway? First of all most customers do not want to change vendors. Worst case they will want to be sold on why they shouldn't so this should not be a problem for sebl since, as we know, sales is sebl's strength. Second, even if it required a complete reimplementation(which I am not saying btw) you are forgetting that they have already paid for the software. Are these other vendors going to give their software away? I doubt it. And last but not least there is no way that the costs to convert to a completely new system from a new vendor would not significantly exceed the costs to convert from one product/architecture to another from the same company. Let's make the assumption here that sebl isn't just going to say here's the new stuff. You figure it out. There may be some additional work involved, granted but sebl will certainly do as much as possible to make this conversion as seamless and as painless as possible. Even if it was a completely new product and sebl scrapped the scop product completely they would still be able to do a lot of this since they have access to both systems. Of course, I'm certain there are those of you (no need to mention names at this point)who will totally disagree with me since they don't think sebl has figured anything out.

To: Kevin Rose who wrote (1476)	5/4/1998 11:17:00 PM
From: Lee L.	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 6974

Hello Kevin, I agree with most of this. However, I don't think that 'D' (Find some way to transition the current SCOP customer base) is really required. As long as SEBL supports the 500+ user base with maintenance and some enhancements, then they will collect the 15% maintenance payment and retain them as customers. A special SCOP technical support group would be required. This scenario is very common for packaged software vendors. How many companies did D&B gobble-up without integrating products and providing migration paths? Should SEBL really care about the current SCOP customer base beyond collecting the maintenance $$$? For the most part, I don't think so. It's the new customer that SEBL wants to attract. A current SCOP customer would rarely go with another CIS vendor. A lot of them may make a lot of noise, but they're not going anywhere.

To: Kevin Rose who wrote (1476)	5/5/1998 10:24:00 AM
From: Trader Dave	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 6974

Geez, travel for a few days and lots of interesting stuff pops up. A simple analogy for everyone: Lotus versus Microsoft in the transition from DOS to Windows. remember microsoft? - integrated windows product suite, low market share in applications. remember Lotus? largest ISV in the world? dominance on DOS platform, responds to integrated msft approach by buying (memory problems here) Samna (?) for word processing and Freehand (from i forget) and database engine from I also forget where. Yep, market dominance and masterful selling can overcome all kinds of integration challenges. Customers looking at a massive architectural change from their current vendor *would never* consider switching to another vendor. TD