Siebel’s current position is a long way from the one it held just a few years ago. Then, it took the same approach as others it’s not our problem. It provided adapters and APIs, but that was all and it couldn’t guarantee backward-compatibility.
However, after a long look at changing market dynamics in which IT spending contracted, dramatically impacting license sales, it looked for a way to convert part of the $90 billion spent on integration into license revenue by productizing integration to minimize the amount of consultancy needed.
With the integration market three times the size of the CRM market, the rationale was that even a small portion would make a significant difference to Siebel’s revenue stream. The result was the Universal Application Network. The objective was not to develop new spend but to shift spending and thereby enable Siebel to tap into it.
Siebel is not alone in attempting to tap into the integration market, but it believes it has an advantage over the others, in that they have had less incentive to move on the messy integration issue because the market opportunity for their core systems was so large.
While SAP for one would certainly dispute that, citing its NetWeaver integration platform as evidence of its commitment to integration, Siebel maintains there is still a critical difference between its approach and that of SAP and its peers.
That being that Siebel is fundamentally multi-vendor-oriented referring to its plans for native support of commercially available application servers as evidence, in contrast to the need to deploy SAP’s application server to maximize application integration across heterogeneous environments and platforms.
The application integration issue is becoming increasingly important to enterprise-level vendors from both a financial and strategic point of view and will be one of the core factors in determining their future success.
Given what is at stake, there is a growing sense of fervor around the issue, with vendors honing in on the issue of standardization as a critical factor and each trying to lay claim to being more standard than the other.
This article was based on material originally published by ComputerWire.
