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

To: Amsterdam who wrote (2145)	10/14/1998 10:38:00 AM
From: eRM Solutions	Respond to of 6974

From today's news wire. Siebel and Active form partnership. If successful this should answer a lot of questions. biz.yahoo.com Regards John

To: Amsterdam who wrote (2145)	10/14/1998 11:10:00 AM
From: Melissa McAuliffe	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 6974

I agree with you in concept that a company should have an edge simply because they are the installed vendor. However, I think that sap and baan's best chance of selling their product is going to if they are able to bundle it into the original deal with the ERP software. In the case of SAP specifically, their software is notoriously difficult to implement and difficult to use thus that can work against them in companies who have experienced it first hand. Also, I think it's important to remember who's buying the front office software. I'm somewhat hard pressed to think a VP of Sales would be willing to accept either a less functional system or a more difficult to use system simply because SAP is installed for the ERP software. In most companies, the VP of Sales has quite a lot of power... With that said, if sebl can simply provide a solution to the integration issue and provide more critical functionality I don't see them losing significantly to SAP. I don't think a lot of these SAP customers necessarily want to go through another SAP product implementation. And, more importantly, even SAP themself is now trying to minimize the importance of integration. This is in published statements, btw, not just heresay. So they won't be able to have it both ways. You can't say integration is important one day in one account and tell a different story the next day to someone else. Another point to keep in mind is that, if, in fact, the Fortune 1000 ERP market is getting saturated, there won't be hundreds of deals for ERP software which might happen to include SFA. So I would expect many of them to be standalone SFA deals....thus I think sebl will win more than their share. Granted, there will also be some companies who will buy from their installed vendor just because they are the installed vendor...but this shouldn't represent a majorty. An additional point to think about is that in all the PSFT customers (of which there are thousands)sebl can go in to these psft customers with an integrated solution so should be able to win these deals hands down. This whole satuated or soon to become saturated ERP market is wide open for SFA.... BTW, I think baan is quickly becoming an also ran so I wouldn't really worry too much about them at this point.