Siebel Spins 'Nexus' For Next-Gen Apps

Siebel Systems is ratcheting up development efforts for its next-generation applications in a project code-named Nexus.

The company is breaking out application functionality into components for distribution and reuse, Siebel Chairman and CEO Tom Siebel told CRN last week. Such strategies are being developed to enable what the industry is calling service-oriented architectures,the next wave of distributed, componentized applications.

Toward that end, Siebel is recruiting and hiring software engineers with J2EE and Microsoft .Net expertise to develop what the company is calling "the Nexus service-oriented framework," which will run on both platforms. The goal is to build CRM, ERM and PRM applications with both horizontal and vertical functions, sources said.

CEO Tom Siebel says Nexus efforts will enable service-oriented architectures.

A spokeswoman for Siebel, San Mateo, Calif., confirmed the work is under way. The first manifestations of Nexus are Siebel's Universal Application Network (UAN) integration game plan and Siebel CRM OnDemand, a hosted application by Siebel and IBM. The full Nexus architecture is expected to emerge in early 2005.

Siebel continues to straddle the major development camps, with one foot in the .Net world and the other in IBM's J2EE realm.

The company has said it is working with Microsoft on "Smart Client" capabilities to tie Siebel functionality into Office Systems front ends and .Net back ends. Siebel CRM OnDemand is J2EE-based.

Despite a tough CRM market, Siebel has been busy. Last month, the company announced plans to buy Upshot, a hosted CRM vendor, just two weeks after Siebel and IBM announced their hosting deal.

	>> 'I think 2004 will be a sleeper year for CRM, and 2005 will be huge.' -- JAY FRUIN, PRESIDENT, LEVERAGED TECHNOLOGY

Siebel, a CRM kingpin and once-darling of Wall Street, has fallen on hard times of late. The economy continues to pinch enterprise IT spending in the market that Siebel dominates, and the company struggles to penetrate smaller businesses with its offerings. Some critics have said Siebel's CRM application costs too much and offers too much functionality for many users.

In addition, Siebel faces entrenched competitors such as Best Software, Microsoft, Onyx Software and Pivotal in the midmarket. And at the enterprise level, competition is heating up from PeopleSoft, SAP and Oracle.

But one integrator said not to count the company out. "Siebel's is still a strong product. Don't discount it," said Jay Fruin, president of Leveraged Technology, a CRM solution provider based in New York. "CRM as a category hasn't gone away; it's just gone to sleep.

"Microsoft doesn't enter any market unless it's a multibillion-dollar opportunity," Fruin added. "I think 2004 will be a sleeper year for CRM, and 2005 will be huge."

ROCHELLE GARNER contributed to this story.