The software includes analytics capabilities such as 200 report metrics and performance indicators that help users pinpoint a company's top 10 partners. It also comes with a suite of partner-recruitment applications that manages everything from partner applications to training, certification, joint marketing agreements, literature management, sales tools, and business planning.
The suite's new Web architecture will provide better scalability than some other partner-and customer-relationship management suites, analysts say. John Ragsdale, a research director for Giga Information Group, advises potential buyers to check vendors' scalability claims carefully to ensure that the software can handle a sufficient number of concurrent users on one implementation. Partner-relationship management environments typically must support thousands of concurrent users, Ragsdale says, and some vendors tout such capabilities when the implementations require multiple installations to scale to that level. IBM and Compaq are two such Siebel customers supporting 6,000 to 10,000 concurrent users on a single database.