Siebel, Microsoft Trade Technology Support Over UAN, .Net

The two companies will work together to ensure that Siebel's enterprise CRM applications will take full advantage of Microsoft's nascent .Net platform, and Microsoft will bless Siebel's Universal Application Network (UAN) strategy by making BizTalk server UAN-compliant, both companies said Monday.

A version of Microsoft's BizTalk integration server that supports UAN, the emerging Business Process Extension Language (BPEL), and Web Services Flow Language (WSFL) is expected to ship in the first quarter of 2001, said Nick Brown, director of the Microsoft program office at Siebel, San Mateo, Calif.

In addition, Siebel and Microsoft plan to collaborate on bringing richer client features, functions and interactivity to sales and marketing users of Siebel. "We want to focus on . . . a next-generation client for rich app features and functions with a Web deployment model," Brown said. "Users want more interactivity, and it's hard to achieve high levels of interaction with desktop apps with a browser when you're at mercy of settings. We're looking at WinForm technology and next-generation ActiveX technologies going into new Web services to reduce our work on infrastructure."

Siebel will thus work with the Microsoft Office and Exchange teams to achieve deeper integration between the companies' respective data stores, and allow Siebel users to integrate with Outlook calendaring and use Microsoft's .Net framework to support emerging mobile technologies and form factors, he added.

CRN broke the news of the UAN/.Net back scratching last month (See related story.) Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates and Siebel Chairman Tom Siebel are outlining the game plan Monday at the annual Siebel user conference in Los Angeles.

In addition, Siebel will optimize its applications for Microsoft server operating systems, SQL Server database and the .Net Framework. Brown said that while the majority of Siebel customers--about 65 percent--are still on Oracle databases, 25 percent are on SQL Server and 10 percent are on IBM's DB2. He said the SQL Server component of Siebel's business is growing 40 percent per year.

Where other enterprise players--SAP and Oracle, for example--are moving full-steam ahead into J2EE game plans, Siebel has gone the .Net route, a move that has its own risks. J2EE has entrenched itself in many enterprise accounts, observers said.

"The Siebel infrastructure right now is its own stuff. If you want to be cruel, you'd call it proprietary. If you don't, you'd call it application-specific," said Mitch Kramer, analyst at the Patricia Seybold Group.

"If Siebel adopted J2EE, it could free infrastructure developers up to do other things. . . . .Net is not as widely used or as proven as J2EE but over time will have the same kinds of advantages--a broad range of application and vendor support and scalability. It's better than an app-specific infrastructure. But .Net glues you to the Microsoft platform, which has advantages and disadvantages. J2EE has platform portability, it will run on .Net but not necessarily use all the .Net facilities," Kramer said.

Siebel announced its UAN enterprise application integration initiative last year with at least vocal support from IBM, SeeBeyond, Tibco and other vendors. Microsoft was not among them.

For the past year, Microsoft and Siebel had been working to negotiate an extension to a deal bundling Great Plains applications with Siebel's midmarket CRM product. With Microsoft working on its own low-end CRM applications, that extension never happened and sources said Siebel warily watched Microsoft plan to enter its CRM space.

Microsoft CRM, due to ship this year, is targeting companies even smaller than those Siebel's midmarket offering targets, but industry observers expect overlap. At the same time, Microsoft dearly needs enterprise-class applications vendors to prove the value of its .Net game plan. Other top Microsoft ISV partners, such as ERP kingpin SAP, are strong J2EE proponents and are also worriedly watching Microsoft's entry into their application turf with its Great Plains and Navision applications.

"We love it when a clear leader in enterprise leader in apps invests in .Net. Beyond that, we found in rolling this deal out we have remarkable shared vision of where enterprise computing is going, the shift to business processes [and the need to lower TCO while still scaling," said Adam Sohn, product manager of .Net Platform at Microsoft.

Both companies said this deal focuses squarely on the enterprise, where large integrators and direct sales models prevail, and not on the midmarket, where channel partners are more prevalent.

Large integrators that already work with Microsoft and Siebel can continue to work as usual. "If you take Accenture as an example, they have a great Siebel practice and a great .Net practice," Sohn said. "They can build that around this alliance. People still need to do the same things with the same partners to get the benefit. Accenture still has to go in and do the system integration work they were doing yesterday, only they will have cooler, richer products to work with."