As part of its Adaptive Solutions strategy, Siebel is
offering a suite of tools designed to provide users with a faster
way to customise their customer relationship management
systems.
During the company's CustomerWorld conference in Boston this
month, Siebel unveiled Component Assembly, a range of open
standards-based products for building custom CRM applications.
Developed in collaboration with BEA Systems, IBM and Microsoft,
the tools are designed to support the development of service
oriented architecture-based CRM applications that run natively on
both Microsoft .net and J2EE application server platforms.
Siebel Component Assembly is based on Siebel Customer Adaptive
Architecture, a strategy and technology architecture covering all
Siebel products and services, which aims to help users anticipate
customer needs more effectively.
Through Adaptive Solutions, based on the service oriented
approach, Siebel said users would be able to realign their
customer-facing business processes for systemic and consistent
improvement, and direct actions across their business to improve
customer satisfaction and profitability.
Andy Kellett, senior research analyst at Butler Group, said the
IT industry was focusing on CRM in order to overcome issues such
as projects taking too long to deliver business value and suffering
a high rate of failure.
"A service oriented architecture is the preferred method for
delivering applications," he said. Using a service oriented
architecture should improve the amount of customer data available
for CRM. "In theory, users should get a better view of their
customers." Kellett added.
Running CRM on a service oriented architecture should simplify
the way businesses take in customer information from different IT
systems.
Kellett noted that CRM was shifting away from looking at
historical customer data to making decisions at the time the
customer contacts the business.
This requires near real-time access to data across different IT
systems. The service oriented approach is the preferred way to
achieve this.
Along with the Component Assembly tool, Siebel has also launched
Business Analytics 7.8. This latest version of its analytics
software is designed to provide business information to sales,
service, marketing, contact centre, finance, supplier/supply chain,
human resources/workforce and executive management.
The analytics application integrates and transforms data from
different data sources, including Siebel, Oracle, PeopleSoft and
SAP enterprise software systems.
Business Analytics 7.8 also provides predictive analytics to
support intelligent customer interactions in real time.