What To Expect At Siebel's User Week Conference

Siebel Systems Inc. today at its User Week conference in San Diego will unveil its "CRM For Everyone" corporate strategy aimed at expanding its core customer-relationship-management software offerings to a wider user base. It also will dedicate its organization to making CRM implementations more relevant to individual companies' specific business-process requirements.

Following up on its announcement last week that it's rolling out a new hosted CRM offering in partnership with IBM--which is aimed at companies that want a low-overhead CRM strategy--Siebel will this week further demonstrate that it's focusing on improving total cost of ownership for users, the company says.

The upcoming Siebel 7.7 release will be enhanced to reduce costs associated with installation, configuration, and maintenance, compared with the current 7.5.3.

Specific modules of Siebel 7.7 are planned for introduction beginning this week, with the announcement of Siebel Analytics 7.7. Further offerings are planned through the end of the year and into the first half of 2004, the company says. Over the next few months Siebel plans to roll out industry-specific modules, such as Manufacturing 7.7 and Retail Banking 7.7.

Analytics 7.7 will be aimed at providing predictive analytics capabilities to nonexpert users, according to Siebel. Secondly, instead of providing essentially analytics for CRM, Analytics 7.7 is designed to help companies perform broader enterprisewide analysis.

Siebel executives say they also plan to demonstrate how its new Siebel OnDemand hosted CRM offering is more than a small- and medium-sized business play intended to stave off competitive pressures from other hosted vendors.