Thursday, October 07, 2004

Siebel enters Chapter 2

No, not Chapter 11. Chapter 2 is Siebel's new strategy, as presented by CEO Mike Lawrie at Siebel's user conference this week, to move beyond selling packaged software and hosted services to offering more customized solutions. The strategy is enabled by the trend to component architecture by many vendors, which makes it easier to build composite solutions.

In this regard, Siebel appears to be aligning with the approach of other major vendors, such as SAP and PeopleSoft.

Personally, I feel that composite applications, which appears to be what Siebel is promoting, are particularly well suited for the CRM space. In my experiences, companies are most likely to develop custom software for customer-facing processes than any other area of the company. If Siebel is successful in this strategy, it could propel Siebel back into a leading position among business application vendors. Siebel has had a tough last few years, and I hope they are successful.

For some reason, I'm having trouble finding an official Siebel press release on Chapter 2. But Computerworld has a short summary of the initiative, as well as a follow up article.

Related posts
Has Siebel turned the corner?
Siebel loses $59M and responds by going on a shopping spree
Siebel makes strategic bet on Microsoft

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