InformationWeek.com

Welcome Guest. | Log In| Register | Membership Benefits

December 20/27, 1999

1999 Product Of The Year
Siebel 99

Products Of The Year:

Broadvision One-To-One

CacheFlow's Web-Caching System

Red Hat Linux 6.1

Novell Directory Services B

Oracle8i

Network-Based Procurement Services

i2 Technologies' Rhythm

Siebel 99

Four-Way Enterprise Servers

Extensible Markup Language

Hardware Renaissance

Most Important Products of the '90s

Send Us Your Feedback

or many companies, 1999 was a year in which customers took center stage. For Siebel Systems Inc., that meant it was a very good year.

As IT departments shifted from year 2000 projects and enterprise resource planning implementations to customer-relationship management, the first place many looked was Siebel, the front-office market leader. The company's sales showed the effects, with revenue growing by more than 75% over last year.

Siebel didn't invent CRM; in fact, it's a relative latecomer. But its Siebel 99 application suite, which added marketing and E-commerce capabilities this year, made CRM possible on a broader scale, spanning sales, customer service, and marketing with scores of application modules.

Charles Phillips, a financial analyst with Morgan Stanley Dean Witter, says Siebel is poised to become a major provider of E-commerce infrastructure software. "There are lots of specialists for each component of the E-commerce infrastructure," Phillips wrote in a recent report. "Siebel's strategy is to compete and integrate with these specialists." The company's momentum should propel it to the $1 billion revenue mark in fiscal 2000, he adds.

ERP vendors such as Oracle and the merged PeopleSoft/Vantive are moving aggressively into CRM, promoting integration with their back-office apps, which could spell trouble for Siebel down the road. But for now, Siebel is the one everyone is chasing.

Read about the next product