Siebel users could face difficult choices after Oracle's
£3.24bn takeover of the CRM market leader last week, analysts have
warned.
Among their main concerns are the cost of a potential forced
migration to the latest version of Siebel and whether products will
remain supported by Oracle.
Paul Hammerman, vice-president of enterprise applications at
Forrester Research, said, "There is going to be apprehension from
Siebel customers because Oracle has been so vocal about its
next-generation product strategy. Siebel customers will be
concerned about when they have to migrate and the cost of
migration.
"Users will have to watch out for release support schedules -
companies with older releases will be forced to upgrade to current
releases [such as Siebel 7.5 and beyond] and the maintenance cost
structure could change."
Hammerman said Siebel users would also be concerned about
whether Oracle would be able to match the functionality of
Siebel.
Michael Maoz, vice-president and fellow at analyst firm Gartner,
said Siebel users on versions prior to 7.5 would probably be
encouraged by Oracle to upgrade to 7.5. He urged companies
considering future Siebel products for the IBM Websphere and
Microsoft .net platforms to reconsider, because Oracle is likely to
favour its own platform and database.
Erin Kinikin, vice-president at Forrester Research, said the
Siebel acquisition would threaten the CRM investments of companies
currently using Oracle or PeopleSoft CRM because of the forthcoming
Project Fusion.
With Fusion, Oracle plans to make all CRM, and other products
from its many acquisitions, interoperable via a large Oracle
software platform based on service oriented architecture.
Kinikin said, "These users should expect a reimplementation
during the Fusion migration."
However, she said the acquisition had some benefits for users,
because it will give them another option for CRM. "If Oracle can
retain Siebel's expertise and get the right mix of features into a
single, J2EE-based product line, with a hosted option, they should
be a good long-term CRM choice," said Kinikin.
"Siebel's CRM expertise and consulting capacity in industries
such as financial services, telecoms and pharmaceuticals, as well
as B2B sales, is a great asset for Oracle users who have not yet
committed to CRM."
David Bradshaw, principal analyst at Ovum, said, "Oracle will
need to support the existing Siebel applications for a period of
time. There will need to be an equivalent set of guarantees to
those given for the PeopleSoft and JDE applications."
When Oracle acquired PeopleSoft and its JD Edwards subsidiary in
January it promised to support users until 2013.
Oracle declined to comment on the concerns voiced by analysts
and users in the aftermath of last week's Siebel takeover. It
adopted the same policy after its PeopleSoft takeover.
Oracle's shopping spree 2005
- January PeopleSoft (CRM software)
- March Oblix (identity management)
- April Retek (retail software systems)
- June TripleHop (enterprise search)TimesTen ("real-time"
software)
- July ProfitLogic (retail software) Context Media (content
integration)
- August i-flex (banking software)
- September Siebel (CRM software)