InformationWeek

Siebel founder and CEO Tom Siebel says the company will eventually work some elements of Sales.com into applications aimed at the enterprise. That's good news for some users. "If it touches sales, we try to do it through Siebel," says Kevin Russell, director of business systems for longtime Siebel customer BMC Software Inc. "We hope our salespeople live and breathe their Siebel application." Pulling together content and services from multiple sources, he adds, would remove the need for his salespeople to hop among applications for information.

Both products will give Siebel exposure in an area in which it has virtually no name recognition, CEO Siebel says. Although the company hopes Sales.com will generate revenue from business sponsors providing content and services, it will see little immediate income from targeted users. Instead, he says, the goal is to get many of the new users to form workgroups, ultimately creating corporate demand for Siebel server software. Siebel's pricing is based on a server model. "We'll make it easy for managers to turn this into a workgroup application," he says.

Siebel Everywhere may pay off as a marketing device and as a way to bring sales-force automation to the masses, analysts say. But they're skeptical of Siebel's ability to reach users who are accustomed tobeing autonomous, partly because the vendor expects users to find each other on their own. "There's no pipeline," says Steve Bonadio, an analyst with the Hurwitz Group. "There has to be a channel to move users upstream."