Siebel Serious About CRM On-Demand

This afternoon, I sat in on a Web conference hosted by Siebel Systems to introduce release 7 of their CRM OnDemand product.

Generally I have to be dragged thrashing and wailing into press briefings, but once I am chained to my chair I settle down and begin to enjoy the experience. And this one wasn't too bad.

If you want to learn about the new product release, an announcement and pretty good overview is here:

Siebel CRM OnDemand Delivers Industry's First Prebuilt Hosted Contact Center Solution

The Web conference today was hosted by Bruce Cleveland, senior VP and general manager for SiebelOnDemand. The actual demo of the product was conducted by Mike Betzer, a VP at Siebel who was the founder and CEO of Ineto, the company purchased about a year ago by Siebel for its on-demand contact center technology. Cleveland referred to Betzer as "the luminary in this industry."

Siebel positions CRM OnDemand as a "complete customer communications platform." I was impressed by Siebel's efforts to provide a product that can be used in an integrated way. Betzer said that "customers are tired of buying multiple-point solutions and trying to integrate them."

In product presentations, I'm most interested in seeing what the user experience is like. Siebel CRM OnDemand does what seems like a good job getting everything into one interface using a tabbed format with left-hand navigation. Here's a sample screen -- might turn out to be kind of small but should give you an idea what it's like:

Some random take-aways I noted from the presentation:

• Siebel acknowledges that Salesforce.com is its chief competitor but claims that Salesforce farms out a lot of capabilities that Siebel's product includes as part of the offering.
• Siebel likes to tout its "Blue Chip customer list," one of which is Ingersoll-Rand, which participated in the presentation and gave a nice mini-case study of how it's using OnDemand to unite its call centers and integrate customer information.
• CRM OnDemand provides a key reporting benefit in providing CRM and call center reporting together.
• Siebel is definitely in the on-demand application business and is investing a lot in this market area.

AB -- 3/29/05