, founded by
Thomas Siebel , is principally engaged in the design, development, marketing and support of Siebel eBusiness Applications, a family of enterprise applications that help organizations manage their relationships, including their interactions with customers (
CRM ), partners, and employees.
Siebel Systems was the dominant CRM vendor in the late 1990's. However, their position began to slip after the
Dot Com Crash . This was attributed to the high
Total Cost Of Ownership (TCO) of the software, and significant problems with the 7.0 suite of products. Siebel Systems' annual revenue has trended downward since 2001.
On
September 12 ,
2005 , it was announced that
Oracle Corporation had agreed to buy Siebel Systems for $10.66 per outstanding share, or approximately $5.85 billion in cash. Stockholders may also elect to receive Oracle shares instead of cash; up to 30% of Siebel's shares may be exchanged this way.
The gradual decrease in the dominance of the Siebel product has been attributed to many factors but perhaps two overriding aspects contributed to the demise of the company. Firstly, Siebel was a CRM application and little else. Whilst it was a powerful engine it is a fact that Siebel never really offered a true HR or Financials application of their own. This meant that most if not all Siebel projects contained a significant integration aspect. As with most IT related projects, integration can be the most difficult of all IT implementation aspects and indeed, many Siebel projects turned out to be significantly more expensive in the long run.
The second aspect is interestingly related to the flexibility of the Siebel application. As the Siebel application was infinitely customizable, practically anything was possible. The functionality of the application was constrained only by the capability of the configuration consultant performing the implementation. This meant that if a client were to ask or enquire as to the availability of a function, the answer would usually be 'Yes'. This lack of a constraining framework resulted in implementation projects running for years and often suffering incredible scope creep.
Where Siebel has suffered, its former competitors have flourished. Oracle and SAP have forged ahead in the CRM marketplace. Curiously it is not because their products are better, more flexible or more powerful than Siebel. It is simply because their products often prove easier to implement and 'integrate'. Both SAP and Oracle offer Finance and HR applications and this fact has allowed them to push their CRM offering to their existing client base - something thnever do. Oracle and SAP CRM applications are naturally integrated with their own base ERP applications thus the difficult integration aspects of implementation projects were hugely reduced. SAP and Oracle effectively now push a 'suite of products' with CRM being a capability within that 'suite'. This homogenous approach has served to constrain the functionality of both offerings with clients being steered down the route of 'standard functionality' and 'out of the box' capability. This curiously has resulted in more successful implementations because the existence of a fixed functional framework has served to constrain the scope of implementations. The design approach required for Siebel implementations was to design and wrap the system around the business process - this proved too expensive. Conversely some SAP and in particular Oracle implementations require the business process to be altered or re-engineered to follow a 'standard' one already built into the application. Gaps are managed by various configuration options and very limited customization. The result is a design and implementation within a fairly rigid framework and from this an implementation can become significantly easier to manage. Oracle and others have succeeded where Siebel failed. Siebel were the victims of their own success in a way. The limitless flexibility, capability and configurability of Siebel meant that the implementation projects became just too big, too complicated and went on for too long.
- Siebel 8.0 (planned)
- Siebel 7.8
- Siebel 7.7
- Siebel 7.5
- Siebel 7.0
- Siebel 6 (also known as Siebel 2000)
- Siebel 99
