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

To: Lee L. who wrote (2427)	12/2/1998 11:46:00 PM
From: Mike Buckley	Respond to of 6974

About a year ago a friend pointed me to an article that said the future of software sales would come not from licensing revenue as we know it today, but from "renting" software/services. If I remember correctly, the idea of a vendor maintaining the software on a server in the net-centric world is the kind of model that was forecast in that article. I wish I could find the article. --Mike Buckley

To: Lee L. who wrote (2427)	12/3/1998 11:23:00 AM
From: Amsterdam	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 6974

As good as it sounds I don't think we'll see much of that happening, although some companies may try it as a low risk first step, and software vendors may view it as a good way to get a pilot up and going quickly to lock out the competition. But long term, the benefit of many front office systems isn't just the productivity of the front office drones, but the single, centralized customer database that results. Most large organizations have boatloads of MBA's at $125K+ that do "market analysis" and similar things. What they really do is analyze historical information using Olap tools and today they've got several databases with redundant and unreliable customer information. Front office systems like Siebel can really change the way these people work, and having your customer data hosted off premises linked to back office systems on premises, and doing olap analysis across both over the internet just won't fly in the long term, IMHO, for most companies.