By David Sims
[email protected]
The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Dave
Brubeck’s Time Out. Just never gets
old, does it?
First CoffeeSM welcomes Bruce Cleveland this morning. Cleveland
is Siebel’s new senior vice president of products, but he’s
still running, as before, the company’s OnDemand hosted CRM product and the
small and medium business division.
Cleveland graciously
took the time to answer some questions First CoffeeSM had.
Excerpts appear below, the entire Q&A will be in an article by First CoffeeSM’s
mild-mannered reporter alter ego on the TMC site later today:
FC: Congratulations on your
promotion at Siebel. Do you get a nicer office now, too?
BC: I’m in the same office, but I’m seeing even less of it than
before!
FC: Your new position puts you
in charge of products, as well as the on-demand business. What do you see as your top challenges in
that position?
BC: Marshalling our resources quickly and effectively to gain the
biggest wins the fastest is a critical challenge. Similarly, rapidly assessing
areas for disinvestment is critical. [And] with our soon-to-be-introduced
custom build CRM solutions, we are moving into an exciting new market.
Continuing to separate fact from fiction as it relates to
our actual market and product leadership will be an ongoing challenge. Everyone
likes to pick on the leader.
FC: The company that comes out
on top in the on-demand CRM space will have done “what” that their rivals
failed to do?
BC: Delivered business impact. Customers are beginning to
recognize that on-demand is a deployment option and nothing more. It’s not a
panacea to CRM success. For a prime example of this, look at the recent report
by JMP Securities highlighting Salesforce.com’s failed implementation at Cisco.
FC: If you could wave a magic
wand over Siebel right now, what’s the one thing you would change,
company-wide?
BC: I think we’ve made our lives a bit too complex and unwieldy,
which is understandable for any organization that grew as fast as we did. Our
CEO, George Shaheen, has stated that simplifying our operations is one of his
key priorities, and I agree.
FC: What’s the most
interesting or important book you’ve read in the past year?
BC: Return on Customer:
Creating Maximum Value From Your Scarcest Resource, by Don Peppers and
Martha Rogers.
FC: You and I have spoken
about the rivalry between salesforce.com and Siebel, which reminds me of a
great sports rivalry, where one keeps forcing the other to get better. Naturally
there’s emotion involved as well, and you mentioned some “creative things”
Siebel could do in response to some of salesforce.com’s stunts. Any ideas?
BC: I’d prefer to surprise you, along with everyone else. But to
be quite honest, we haven’t had to resort to anything trickier than delivering
a solid product.
We are completely focused on sales, marketing and service
success – not gimmicks. Our goal is to deliver honest value, not hype. We have
taken the processes and templates used by some of the world’s most successful
companies and built them into an affordable solution that anyone can use.
FC: What’s the next great
innovation in the on-demand CRM space? Are you looking for it in pricing
models, delivery or content?
BC: It could be all of the above. The most important take-away
is that on-demand CRM is simply a deployment option. I don’t mean that
critically. We take the on-demand market very seriously.
But overall, it’s like the old Maslow quote, “If the only
tool you have is a hammer, you will see every problem as a nail.” We are unique
in providing organizations with every conceivable build and buy deployment
option – not just hosted CRM.
…
A tip of the coffee pot to Ruth Habbe, just named Demandware, Inc.’s vice president of
marketing, where she’ll concentrate on “building upon the company’s
momentum in helping multi-channel retailers,” according to company officials.
Prior to Demandware, Habbe served as President at MediaMap,
Inc., an application service provider delivering a CRM Communications Management
application.
…
New research by independent market analysts Datamonitor
and outsourcing advisory firm Everest
Group this morning has found that the
average size of IT and BPO services contracts almost halved in the second
quarter of 2005.
Based on figures from Datamonitor’s “IT Services Contracts
Tracker,” the
average size of contracts announced by IT and BPO services vendors in the second
quarter of 2005 fell to $56 million compared to $106 million in the year ago
period, according to company officials. “This means that average deal size has
now declined for four consecutive quarters,” Datamonitor concludes.
Datamonitor’s “IT Services Contract Tracker” tracks
every new outsourcing, systems integration and consulting deal with a value
greater than $1 million signed by major IT services vendors, and has tracked over
7,500 contracts during the last five years.
Datamonitor tracked a total of 447 deals during the second
quarter of 2005, which represented a 7.5% rise over the 416 contracts logged
during the year-ago period. However the value of deals fell by 43% from $44.1 billion
to $25 billion.
Company officials say the decline in average deal size was “largely
due to a fall in the number of mega-deals signed during the quarter.”
Datamonitor tracked three deals with a value greater than $1 billion – two for IBM
and one for BT Group, compared to six in the second quarter of 2004. The number
of deals with a value greater than $100 million also fell to 49 from 70 over
the same period.
…
NetSuite, Inc. is announcing this morning
that Santa Clara-based Helio Solutions,
“Sun Microsystems’ largest West Coast technology integrator,” according to
NetSuite’s press release, has ripped out accounting software from
Peachtree and a proprietary CRM package in favor of NetSuite.
Helio has 60 employees, hitting NetSuite’s sweet spot of the
small and medium-sized market. Still, they’re in the top half of the VARBusiness 500 list of the industry’s
largest value-added resellers, with revenue of $88 million.
…
First CoffeeSM was in Ankara yesterday, a city
with all the charm of a military airport cargo terminal, getting passports
renewed and was a bit out of the loop. Catching up, it appears yesterday Tom Sanders
wrote about IBM’s new set of tools “that
allows enterprises to use blogs for collaboration, bringing enterprise
class management tools to the world of online diaries.”
Corporate blogging. That’s one of those
things that just sounds wrong, like “government journalist,” “The Anarchy
Institute” or “Islamic rock’n’roll.”
“Blogging applications have so far catered to individuals
who make postings without any support or management from a larger entity,”
Sanders writes, doing a fine job summing up everything worthwhile and interesting
about blogs in one sentence.
Monkey around with that and you’ll end up with something
about as interesting as an “underground student newspaper” edited by the Dean
of Students. Oh you’ll have a vehicle for integrating into your organizational
communicational flow chart but it’ll have as much to do with “blogging” as N’Sync
does with “punk rock.”
If read off-site hit http://blog.tmcnet.com/telecom-crm/
for the fully-linked version. First CoffeeSM accepts no sponsored
content.