In an bid to distance itself from rivals such as Salesforce.com Inc., customer relationship management vendor Siebel Systems Inc. is adding new sophistication to its hosted service that it said puts it in a league all of its own.
The San Mateo, Calif.-based company Tuesday announced Siebel OnDemand Release 6, which offers out-of-the-box sales workflows, dashboards and customization tools. Siebel is also rolling out prebuilt packages specifically geared for the financial services, automotive, medical and high-tech sales industries.
The applications have both industry-specific interfaces and data models, Bruce Cleveland, senior vice president and general manager of Siebel OnDemand and small and midsize businesses, said in a webcast. The moves fulfill promises that company officials made last year at their Siebel User Week conference, where they unveiled the Chapter 2 strategy. That strategy points the company toward emphasizing successful CRM processes instead of just implementing the technology and offers a vertical focus, they said.
To that end, Siebel developers wrote a software object embedded in the financial services package that will allow portfolio advisors to create profiles on specific clients to help better manage leads and boost sales. Other enhancements include analytical tools, such as prebuilt dashboards and reports that can measure the velocity of leads flowing through a sales pipeline, he said.
Siebel has also created a tool to help coach salespeople to follow predetermined best practices to ensure that they capture accurate sales prospect data in the system. In addition, there are advanced territory management capabilities, as well as support for the Chinese, Korean and Portuguese languages.
The embedded analytical features will make OnDemand into a complete business intelligence tool, said Nigel Watson, CRM program manager at Cendant Corp."s travel distribution services branch. Cendant, a New York-based travel and real estate services provider, is already using the Siebel OnDemand tool, which enables sales personnel in different parts of the company to share relevant customer data. In addition, OnDemand 6 could help managers with multinational accounts get a global view of their customers" activities across different geographical regions, Watson said. That could help them make decisions on things such as territory distribution and customer assignments.
"The new release of Siebel OnDemand is an attempt to position Salesforce as "Siebel lite,"" independent analyst J. Bruce Daley, who writes the "Siebel Observer" newsletter, said in a statement. By focusing on industry verticals where the company has a significant market lead, such as financial services, Siebel hopes to give some buyers pause and even encourage existing Salesforce.com customers to switch.
"This should lay to rest any doubts about Siebel"s commitment to compete head-to-head with Salesforce.com," Daley said.
Siebel CRM OnDemand Release 6 is available now and starts at US$70 per user per month.