By Siobhan Kennedy
Oracle Corp has hatched an aggressive plan to win over a third or more of its rival Siebel Systems Inc’s newly-acquired Scopus customers by this time next year. The move, Oracle says, is in response to CEO Tom Siebel, reneging on his promise to upgrade Scopus users to Siebel for free. Siebel enticed [Scopus] users by ensuring them a free upgrade path and saying the Scopus license would be honored for an equivalent Siebel license, said Oracle’s Mark Barrenechea, VP front office applications. Now Mr Siebel is saying ‘No no no you misunderstood’ and he’s making them pay for the upgrades, he added. As part of its strategy, Oracle will today announce a 60-day special offer whereby Scopus customers can upgrade to Oracle’s front office applications and get a 50% discount off the price. At the same time, it’s set up the Scopus/Siebel Path Consulting program, to help users make the transition to Oracle software. Barrenechea said the company had acted now because it perceived that the motivation of Scopus customers to upgrade to Siebel was pretty low. He said Oracle had received calls from Scopus customers telling of their frustration that they had invested in technology, been shown an upgrade path, only to realize it was too difficult to get on that path. Barrenechea said Oracle would use resources and staff from within its worldwide consulting arm and its front office applications division to market to Scopus customers. He said it was the company’s aim was to win over at least a third of Siebel’s installed base, around 800 users, by this time next year. This latest move is part of the database giant’s aggressive strategy to make a name for itself in the front end application space. Speaking to ComputerWire in October (CI No 3,521), Barrenechea said it was Oracle’s plan to become the number one vendor, in terms of growth, this year and the second biggest player in the front end apps market, next to Siebel, by next year. But Richard Gorman, Siebel’s VP of product marketing, says that’s not possible. We don’t see them in deals at all, he said, why can’t Oracle give us the facts to back up its claims? It’s not a significant player, its market share isn’t even measurable. Gorman dismissed Oracle’s attempts to win over Scopus customers as humorous. We kept all of our promises to the Scopus customers. We successfully integrated the Scopus functionality into Siebel 99 and our customers are completely delighted. But Barrenechea, who refused to disclose the number of Oracle front-end customers, remained adamant: By the end of the fiscal year next May, Oracle will be demonstrably ahead of Vantive and Clarify and really threatening Seibel, in all measures, in growth, in revenues and in customer wins.
