Customer relationship management software supplier Siebel Systems
is to ship the latest version of Siebel eBusiness Applications
globally in the fourth quarter.
Siebel 7.5 will include new functionality for multichannel sales,
marketing, service, and partner and employee relationship
management. Siebel has also documented hundreds of
industry-specific CRM "best practices" and embedded them into the
functionality of Siebel 7.5, Neil Morgan, vice-president marketing,
Europe, Middle East and Africa, said.
"We have tried to expand within the customer base from CRM towards
ERM (employee relationship management) and analytics," Morgan said.
"Siebel 7.5 is the beginning in a very big change shift for us, a
shift towards focusing on a broader CRM approach, and bringing in
the best practices approach is a big part of that," he added.
Siebel already supports Web Services to some extent as well as
standards-based integration through Universal Application Network
but Siebel 7.5 adds support for Soap and WSDL. Users will be able
to publish business services and workflow processes as Web Services
while also being able to generate WSDL documents for business
services and business processes. External tools will in turn be
able to use the WSDL file to develop applications that interact
with Siebel Web Services, the company said.
The upgraded product will also provide interoperability between
Siebel eBusiness Applications and J2EE and .net products. "I think
that it will be a coexistence world with both J2EE and .net," said
John Simpson, director, sales consulting, Siebel Systems UK.
Although companies such as SAP and PeopleSoft are focusing on open
standards, Siebel believes demand for interoperability with .net is
important to its customer base. "We are doing what our customers
ask us to do and they are saying that they want to bring Siebel
into their .net environment," Morgan said.
Since Siebel announced version 7.0 of its CRM suite last November,
70 customers have gone live with the software while another 700 are
in the process of implementing the software, Morgan said. The
company has 3,500 customers for the suite worldwide, he added, and
the proportion who have upgraded is fairly "standard" for the
industry, he said.
News and technology company Reuters Group is one of the customers
in the process of implementing Siebel 7.0 and plans to take on
parts of 7.5 as it rolls out the system across the company. "We
tell people well in advance when upgrades are coming along,"
Simpson said. "Reuters knew about 7.5 and planned for that
transition. There will most likely be some additional charges to
Reuters for going to certain aspects of 7.5," Simpson said.
Other highlights of Siebel 7.5, according to the company, include:
Siebel Sales for global account management; Siebel Interactive
Selling with improved customer order management, product catalogue
and pricing management; Siebel Marketing, which includes budgeting
and objectives management as well as enhanced customer and
promotion analytics and Siebel Call Center, with real-time service
analytics.