Siebel 7.5 Integrates Business Process Help, Adds ERM And Analytics Modules

A major thrust for Siebel 7.5 is the addition of best-practice and business-process definitions to the software itself, said David Schmaier, executive vice president of the San Mateo, Calif.-based vendor. The current Siebel 7 release shipped last November.

"We've defined [about 500 business processes that we think represent the best practices in sales, marketing, customer service and other applications," Schmaier told CRN.

The goal is to ease rollouts even into specialized vertical niches. That could mean less money flowing into the pockets of systems integration partners, although Schmaier maintained that Siebel is merely raising the lowest common denominator.

"There's plenty of integration opportunity," he said."We're taking integration expertise and packaging it up. Twenty years ago, companies built custom apps with integrators. Today, integrators implement packaged applications and yet the systems integration business has grown."

Several new analytics and ERM modules represent a good upsell and cross-sell opportunity, he said. Corporations on maintenance contracts are covered on the price of updates to their existing modules.

Siebel could use some good news. The once-high-flying stock is now trading in the single digits, closing Tuesday at $7.74 per share. Some critics agree with Siebel's contention that it has the most feature-rich CRM implementation, but say that can be a hindrance as well as an advantage. The media is rife with stories about expensive CRM implementations that failed to live up to expectations.

In addition, Siebel will soon face more competition at the low end when Microsoft unveils its own CRM offering later this year. The two companies agreed to part ways and stop bundling Microsoft Great Plains accounting applications with Siebel's MidMarket CRM offering as of the end of this year (See related story.)

Many observers expect Microsoft to follow its usual playbook by starting at the low end and moving up into the enterprise with a raft of business applications from CRM to ERP and Professional Services Automation. (See related story.)

As previously reported in CRN, Siebel 7.5 also adds support for WSDL, UDDI, and SOAP Web services protocols.