Siebel 7.5 Sets Sights On Web Services Support

Siebel 7.5, due this summer, will add support for SOAP, WSDL and UDDI protocols, said Bharath Kadaba, vice president of Siebel's Universal Application Network group.

Nearly all application vendors from Oracle and IBM to Microsoft have professed support for these standards. Theoretically, such support will enable Web services to be described, found and accessed on the Internet. (SOAP, or the Simple Object Access Protocol, is a message-based protocol for accessing services on the Web. Universal Description, Discovery and Integration acts as a sort of Yellow Pages directory listing services available on the Web. Those services are described in Web Services Description Language so they can be found.)

Siebel, the market leader in CRM, is rushing to embrace the Web. Last winter it released Siebel 7, with the company's first fully Web-based client. Now it is seeking to enter the Web services fray with 7.5, observers said.

In addition, last week Siebel, backed by several enterprise application integration (EAI) vendors and systems integrators, launched an initiative to standardize enterprise application integration.

"The problem is our larger customers have many, many applications they want to connect. Ten percent of [them have more than 1,000 applications--the problem of integration is huge," said Kadaba. Many customers resort to point-to-point connections which "in the case of 100 applications, means 10,000 connections. It's not scalable," he noted.

Integration servers reduce that complexity somewhat because all the applications plug into a central point, but the EAI servers themselves tend to be proprietary and non-standard, said Kadaba. What Siebel would like to see is a way for standards-based business processes to plug into industry-standard servers, raising the least common denominator of interoperability.

The problem now is that each EAI vendor has its own toolset and environment and typically runs on one platform. "This is top-to-bottom integrated and proprietary. We want these vendors to modify their platform in order to receive models built in standards-based language."

Siebel said EAI vendors IBM, SeeBeyond, Tibco Software, Vitria and webMethods are aboard with this effort. Conspicuously absent is Microsoft, which pushes BizTalk server as its primary EAI platform. Kadaba did not rule out Microsoft joining the effort further down the line.

Kadaba said the widespread adoption of the XML language as well as growing use of the emerging XSLT (eXtensible Stylesheet Language Transformation) standard for data translation between different vendors' applications will speed the Universal Application Network road map.

He expects to see concrete progress by late summer when Siebel plans to have some of its own business processes connectors available. Pricing and packaging have not been determined.

Integrators see application integration as a top priority.

"Our clients and Siebel's customers are pressuring us to improve time to value ... so anything we can do to accelerate return on investment is important," said Paul Cole, vice president and global leader of Cap Gemini Ernst and Young's CRM service in Boston. "Siebel increasingly realizes it does not exist as an island unto itself. The real value is integrating the front office to back office with the whole EAI layer as facilitator."

This is just the latest in a series of vendor moves to embrace Web services, observers said. The race is on to break out key application functions and make them available over the Web.

"There's tremendous convergence going on. One vendor starts from the back office and moves to the front, others start in front and move back to show customers they can do end-to-end, fully integratable but modular suites. But clients will continue to operate in heterogeneous environments and integration challenges will continue," Cole said.

Cap Gemini Ernst and Young as well as Accenture, IBM Global Services and KPMG Consulting are also backing Siebel's effort.