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Tom
Siebel
Unofficially... News and Best Sites about Siebel
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Tom Siebel's Product
Siebels website says:Siebel CRM software solutions can be installed on customers premises, delivered online via a hosted service, or deployed in some combination. Available in more than 20 industry-specific versions, Siebel software solutions embed industry best practices for sales, marketing, and customer service. And, through interactive analytic dashboards, they provide real-time insight for all users, enabling better, smarter decision-making. Siebel CRM software solutions integrate easily and cost-effectively with any set of applications, and they are supported by a comprehensive set of services reflecting ten years of CRM knowledge and experience.
Siebel's website has comprehensive information about the group of products, but it's mostly in sales-speak. This section attempts to unravel the sales pitch. Mr Siebel's vision for the product came from difficulties he had whilst working with Oracle. CRM products were already around in generic forms. The product began as a scalable, best of breed CRM system - a system to handle a companies sales and contacts, organize activities, and help with forecasts, deadlines and the ultimate improvement of sales. The product was always aimed at large corporations with many users and licenses. It was always far too expensive for small to medium size companies to even consider. Even of they could afford the software and licenses, the implementation is the more expensive proportion of overall cost. Although not quite as bad as some of the consultancy SAP stories that were going around in the late 1990's, implementations usually ran into $millions for most projects. However the advantage large companies saw for the software usually meant that the cost of the installation was more than offset by the subsequent profit.
The Siebel product today has become a complex array of modules and applications that are brought together to meet the customers need. If implementors of 1998 had a good grasp of the Siebel product, they now generally have to specialize in one of it's areas. There are configurators, server administration specialists, workflow and assignment manager specialists, EAI (Enterprise Application Integration), EIM (Enterprise Integration Manager), and many others. Further, since Tom Siebel heralded the death of CRM and the new need to provide CRM for each market segments with Business Processes included - implementors have also become accustomed to work with specific verticals - hence a Siebel Financial Services worker isn't very familar with Siebel ePharma, etc., even though the products utilize many of the same base components. The explosion of new modules and applications have not been only as a result of Tom Siebel's recognition that verticle industry products were the future for corporations. The other primary driver for the products changes have been the huge issue of application integration. Corporations that are in scope for the Siebel product typically have thousands of IT systems of which somne hundreds need to be integrated together to make Siebel really assist with greater sales for the company.
The product runs on a third party database, currently either IBM's DB2, Oracle, or MS SQL Server. The latest version of the product carrying the integer version of 7 (Sept 2004), has four layers. The database layer retrieves data from the database. The object layer is, crudely speaking, re-usable SQL statements to interrogate and update the database. The UI or logical layer serves as a means of organizing the data into applets and passing it from the object layer to the next layer, (in previous versions this was the final display layer), and the physical layer provides the display of the data through web templates to a browser. The mechanisms described here necessitate much translation work being performed, particularly between the object layer and the physical layer, and betwen the server machines containing the application server and the web server. There is therefore a delay for information to be displayed - a delay which was unacceptable in the earliest #7 versions. Later versions, particularly version 7.7 have greatly improved the speed of UI display.
As competition intensifies - with SAP and Microsoft contending for the crown - Tom Siebel's ingenuity is needed more than ever for the product to continue it's dominance in the CRM market space.
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