Microsoft, Siebel To Exchange Pledges For .Net, UAN Support

Microsoft Siebel Systems

When he takes the stage to deliver his keynote at Siebel's annual user conference next month, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates is slated to throw his company's weight behind UAN, Siebel's effort to simplify enterprise application integration. The moves come just as the two get ready to battle it out in the CRM market.

When Siebel announced its UAN plan last year, IBM, Tibco, SeeBeyond, webMethods and others were aboard. Microsoft, which is pitching its own BizTalk Server as an integration hub, was conspicuously absent, although at the time Siebel said it was talking to Microsoft about its support.

Oracle, SAP and others are working on their own integration servers.

Meanwhile, Microsoft and Siebel were busy trying to renegotiate a three-year-old pact under which Microsoft Great Plains financial applications were bundled with Siebel MidMarket CRM. Earlier this month, however, the two companies said they agreed to end the deal just as Microsoft was preparing to launch a new beta of its own low-end CRM package, Microsoft's first CRM server.

Siebel's UAN is a framework for application connectors that would ease data integration. The idea is to make myriad corporate applications communicate without having to write thousands of custom links between them.

Last spring, Siebel Executive Vice President David Schmaier said corporations are currently struggling with such linkages. "If you have 5,000 applications, that means thousands squared, or 25 million connections. It is an intractable problem," he told CRN.

At the same venue, Siebel Chairman Tom Siebel is expected to throw his company's support behind Microsoft's .Net Web services strategy, sources said. "UAN and .Net are not mutually exclusive," said one Siebel source. "They can be woven together."

Siebel officials were not available for comment, and Microsoft declined to comment.

One Microsoft partner who specializes in CRM lauded the move. Application integration is "a pain," and UAN appears to have vendors' support, said the partner, who declined to be named.