Siebel officials are calling 2004 a breakout year for its Business Analytics division which reported revenue of $116.6m, representing an impressive 44% annual growth rate over 2003.
While the division’s revenue is still dwarfed in comparison to business intelligence and analytic giants like Business Objects, Cognos and Hyperion, its growth certainly stands out. If Siebel’s breakdown is to be believed, then its Business Analytics suite is returning the fastest organic growth of any publicly held business intelligence firm.
Competitors would argue however that Siebel is factoring growth off a small base. But many of these vendors competed for the same accounts last year, even within pure Siebel CRM sites.
Not surprisingly most of Siebel’s analytics business is derived from its core installed customer base, where the company leverages its core competencies in managing customer data and processes. The proposition of getting your analytics from the same vendor that manages your customer transactions is clearly compelling to many users.
However Siebel has greater ambitions and is now starting to expand its suite into other areas. In the fourth quarter it added 20 new software modules to its suite aimed at broader areas like financial, supply chain and workforce analytics.
San Mateo, California-based Siebel is also working hard to break the perception, fueled in no small part by business intelligence pure-plays, that its breed of analytics is suited for wall-to-wall Siebel shops. The company has introduced a comprehensive set of pre-built adapters that interface with a range of non-Siebel business application such as SAP, Oracle and PeopleSoft.
Siebel also attributed last year’s strong growth to a strong partnership strategy, which includes influential business intelligence infrastructure giants like Teradata, IBM and Microsoft.
Over the past year Siebel has deepened its alliances with all three vendors. IBM DB2 Data Warehouse Edition and Siebel Business Analytics are already calibrated to work together. IBM’s Business Consulting Services (BCS) division also delivers a prepackaged offering and has also created a center of excellence around the Siebel Business Analytics suite.
Siebel also strengthened its relationship with enterprise data warehousing giant Teradata last year to deliver optimized solutions running on Teradata’s database. The two companies have also jointly rolled out an implementation methodology to integrate Teradata’s industry-specific Logical Data Models with Siebel’s prebuilt analytic applications
There is still plenty of scope for Siebel to sell its analytics software into its vast installed base. So far only 600 of its 4,000-strong CRM customers have licensed its analytic solutions. Of these Siebel says around 75% are licensing its fully blown Enterprise Edition.
Siebel boasts that 15 of the largest 25 Fortune 500s in the US have signed up, including four of the top five commercial banks, seven out of the top nine pharmaceuticals and four of the top five telco providers.
Still Siebel has a big market to penetrate before it can claim leadership of any kind. IDC pegs the analytic software market to grow to $1.5bn by the end of 2008, and estimates that Siebel now has a 15% share of this market.
The announcement was made as Siebel’s BI Summit which is running concurrently with its fifth European user conference in Barcelona, Spain this week.
