Speaking at Siebel’s CustomerWorld user conference in Boston, Shaheen said that Siebel’s fast-growing Analytics division could have led the turnaround of the ailing CRM giant if it was given enough time.
I think our BI and analytics business was our secret ticket… an absolute sleeping giant in our portfolio, he said during a Q&A session at the event.
Siebel set up its Business Analytics division a couple of years ago to capitalize on the growing interest in BI and analytics software as a way for companies to squeeze greater value from their hefty operational ERP and CRM system investments.
The technological foundation for Siebel’s analytic journey was laid by the October 2001 acquisition of nQuire Software Inc, which developed analytic server and web-based query and analysis products. On top of this Siebel has built a suite of pre-built analytic applications for sales and marketing, service, contact centers, finance, supply chain, HR and executive management.
When Siebel Business Analytics was first released, many regarded it as a move to sell BI and analytics within the Siebel CRM base since the applications all come with pre-built interfaces for Siebel’s CRM suite.
While the majority of sales so far have played out this way, Siebel officials stress that its Business Analytics system is also aimed at non-Siebel customers and point to the subsequent development of additional pre-built ETL interfaces for other ERP systems from Oracle, SAP and PeopleSoft.
Siebel claims 680 customers of its Business Analytics software to date. Most are thought to be Siebel shops, though the software is starting to make headway in broader customer bases as well.
While Shaheen expressed regret that its analytics business did not have time to fully blossom under Siebel’s wing. But he believes its momentum will continue under Oracle. You’re just now beginning to see how far ahead we are.
Shaheen’s comments came as Siebel unveiled its latest edition of Siebel Business Analytics software, version 7.8. The release comes with a laundry-list of functional tweaks and enhancements including: improved self-service capabilities, tighter integration with Microsoft Office, new visualization and graphical charting tools, additional role-based dashboards, improved report formatting, pre-built portlets, and a more open Web services API.
Siebel has also woven new best practice metrics, processes and workflows into the applications and has broadened its industry-specific offerings with new analytic models aimed at pharmaceuticals, public sector, strategic sourcing and call center analysis.
For the IT version 7.9 also provides scalability enhancements to the ETL engines.
In a parallel announcement Siebel also took the wraps off a new suite of predictive analytic applications dubbed as Siebel Real-Time Decisions (RTD) which plug into CRM software from Siebel and other vendors. The software leverages predictive analytics to drive more intelligent and profitable customer interactions by predicting customer behaviors.
The application features multi-channel analysis support, an self-learning capability that adapts the predictive engine over time, and time-sensitive analytic models that place greater emphasis on recent customer behavior.
Siebel has also verticalized the RTD applications for industries like communications, financial services and media.
Siebel did not disclose specific pricing details of the new analytic roll-outs.
This is our most significant release to date, said Larry Barbetta, senior vice president and general manager of Siebel Business Analytics. He was also quick to position Siebel Business Analytics 7.8 is a key element underlying Siebel’s new Customer Adaptive Applications Strategy and Architecture, which Siebel separately announced recently.
While Siebel’s CRM applications business has been floundering in the wake of growing competition from Salesforce.com Inc and SAP AG, its Business Analytics division has prospered, growing nearly 45% last year and making it the fastest growing BI and analytics vendor in the industry. Admittedly Siebel Analytics is bouncing off a much smaller revenue base than larger BI vendors, with analytics revenue standing at around $112m and accounting for 22% of overall license revenue.
This growth contrasts a 10% drop in Siebel’s license revenue for its core sales, marketing and customer service applications.
Siebel’s BI and analytic announcements shouldn’t come as a surprise. When Shaheen took over the reins at the San Mateo, California-based company earlier this year he earmarked analytics as one four key growth areas for the company.
Of course the continued success of Siebel’s analytic software heavily depends on what Oracle plans to do with it. The question is whether Siebel Business Analytics will get lost in the merger shuffle or whether it will establish Oracle as a new BI powerhouse to be reckoned with in the next 12 to 24 months.
Its fair to say that despite having an embarrassment of BI riches at its disposal, Oracle’s BI and analytics strategy has been haphazardly articulated. The company’s technology in this area spans across data warehousing (ETL and database), OLAP, ad hoc query and analytic applications. The problem is the company has never figured out how to present this to customers as a solution that’s decoupled from its core relational database.
But there are signs that Oracle is starting to get more serious. At last year’s OracleWorld conference BI took center stage as Oracle unveiled a new architecture to simplify its BI offerings and continued to revamp its product line over the summer.
Of course with PeopleSoft now in its grip Oracle has also inherited a mature suite of enterprise performance management (EPM) applications and has gained an immediate foothold in the HR analytics space.
Oracle certainly seems to have most of major functional bases – HR, sales and now CRM – covered from an analytic perspective. Perhaps what’s missing is strong financial analysis and enterprise reporting capability, which given Oracle’s continued acquisition streak, could be the next gap it seeks to plug.
