Tom Siebel Unofficially... News and Best Sites about Siebel   Home His Profile Older News Sites About Him His Product Who is Tom Siebel? Summary Thomas M. Siebel is the founder and current Chairman and CEO of Siebel Systems Inc., the world's leading provider of enterprise-class sales, marketing and customer service information systems. Founded in 1993 and based in San Mateo, CA, Siebel Systems was the fastest growing company in 1999 according to Fortune magazine. Born in Chicago, Tom Siebel is the son of Arthur F. Siebel, a Harvard lawyer, and housewife Ruth Siebel. He has an excellent education and is clearly exceptionally intelligent, having three degrees from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign: a BA in history (1975), an MBA (1983) and an MS in computer science (1985). After joining Oracle and experiencing a meteoric rise to become the company's top sales person, Siebel became vice president of Oracle USA. Before founding Siebel Systems, Siebel was CEO of Gain Technology, a multimedia software company. Tom Siebel has broad ties to the University of Illinois and a strong commitment to the Department of Computer Science. He has served as a panelist in the College of Engineering's Higgerson Forum on Entrepreneurship Through Engineering. In 1998, he delivered one of the first lectures in the Department of Computer Science's Distinguished Entrepreneur Series. Mr Siebel is a salesman. Possibly the best ever. He consistently beat sales quotas while working for Oracle from 1984 to 1990. One huge difference was an understanding of the technology he was selling, having earned a master's degree in computer science from the University of Illinois (he also holds a bachelor's degree in history and has an MBA). He took a leave of absence from Oracle in 1990. The following year, Oracle suffered a downturn, a result of an overzealous sales force and creative bookkeeping. Later, Mr Siebel said that he saw the wreck coming and decided to avoid the crash. Tom never returned to Oracle. Instead, he took the leadership of Cayenne Systems, a small multimedia company. In 1992, he organized the sale of the company, which had then been renamed Gain Technology, to Sybase for $105 million, making many employees within Gain become millionaires. The following year Tom and former Oracle colleague Patricia House gathered their own funds to start Siebel Systems. Avoiding venture capital meant doing things on the cheap. The first office furniture was retrieved from bankruptcy auctions, and many of its initial employees worked for stock options rather than salaries. (The IPO brought about 70 of them into the millionaire club.) Employees who have held onto their options initially got much richer. Siebel's stock split 4 times, and even after occasional dips along with the rest of the tech sector, its value rose by nearly 3,300% since it began trading in 1996. Mr Siebel himself became worth $4.7 billion. All until that is, the bust of 2000. Employees holding shares that would have made them millionaires were left holding shares that went lower than $10 per share. Many still hold the shares believing that Siebel will prosper and attain dizzying heights of value once again. Every tech company suffered and Siebel Systems had the greatest salesman ever at the healm. They wouldn't only survive but would excel. Siebel viewed the economic downturn as a healthy cyclical change that would whittle down weaker competitors, leaving strong, well-managed companies like his even stronger. Siebel took the time to "oil the machines" and get ready for another period of rapid growth once companies start buying technology again, which he expected to happen in 2002, but has only just started to happen in late 2004. With the company mature and stable, Tom Siebel became less autocratic, delegating more authority to employees and devoting more time to his personal life. Potential employees of Siebel are aware of the most famous employee policy. In good times, the lowest performing 5% of employees are fired. This is in sympathy with his life moto - 'keep raising the bar'. In the recent downturn the loss of employees has been much greater with perhaps half of the entire workforce laid off. The policy doesn't go down well in Europe with an employment attitude far different from the USA. Many lawsuits have been brought in countries that don't share the precarious and unstable employment policies of America, where hiring and laying off of workforces is an accepted regularity of corporate life. Even in that stressful environment, Siebel has been seen as somewhat extreme as an employer. Tom Siebel has authored three books, 'Taking Care of eBusiness', which gives a prescription for multichannel eBusiness that results in increases in revenue, productivity, and customer satisfaction. Siebel outlines a five-step method for deploying an eBusiness strategy, and how to match products and services to customer requirements. His other titles are 'Virtual Selling' and 'CyberRules'. Mr Siebel was noted in early 2003 for his bold statement that 'CRM is Dead!'. Whilst this appeared to be a statement, the fulfillment of which would sound the death knell for his own company more than any other - in fact, his insight was that the market for generic CRM software was waning in large corporations. Instead, they would buy software that incorporates industry best practices and processes and then adapt their way of doing business to the software. Like most revolutionary ideas, business process software may seem simple on the surface, but it has far reaching consequences. The prophecy has led Siebel Systems to produce software called 'verticals' that incorporate best practices for many specific industries. ERP software - led by SAP has gone a similar way. Siebel neither looks, acts nor sounds like someone under a dark cloud. He appears confident, compelling and knowledgeable. He strikes people as someone who has the ground firmly under his feet and knows what direction he wants his organization to go in. Siebel is a man of convictions. Among those convictions: The CRM market is dead A new generation of application software is about to be built, which, for lack of a better name, can be called business processes applications The technology that enables this new generation of applications is Web Services To be competitive, future application packages will be not generic but industry specific The change in technology and functionality will drive most existing software companies out of business and dramatically change the shape of the industry Womens Clothing Nintendo GameCube Baby Clothing Car Auctions Laptops MP3 Handheld PDA Video Capture Night Vision          Siebel Resources     Visit our Friends: Chess Sets UK | Improve Chess | Chess Sets USA