Siebel customers have reports but they do not use them to drive business performance, Mr Rodwick said. One set of barriers appears to be the means of presentation and integration with operational systems. You need the right interface, integrated into operational systems, he said. Siebel’s advantage where CRM analytics is concerned, he said, is that it has insight into the operational system and user interface where traditional BI systems from third parties such as SAS Institute do not.
The company appears to be developing role-based user interfaces where the interface is crafted and substantially different for different types of users, from managers to front-line staff. Reducing complexity and increasing appropriateness are key, and like other vendors, it could be taking a lead from the Google- and Yahoo-style of interface development.
The company is also working on the proactive delivery of information whereby information is automatically pushed to individuals in a format and via a user interface appropriate for the task.
Mr Rodwick sees analytics as a means of supercharging CRM applications but said that in order to gain the maximum advantage, operational and analytical systems have to be based on a single architecture, avoiding the problems associated with multiple applications, different types of metadata and user interfaces, as well as multiple versions of the truth, and potentially, limited scalability. You can build systems from products from a traditional BI vendor but they don’t scale. They cannot integrate into business processes and drive into operational systems, he said. Siebel has an enterprise BI platform and can tap into data sources and operational systems.
Siebel does have a powerful CRM analytics platform, and analytics is one of its fastest growing areas within the company. There are 650 users, some of whom are pure analytics users and do not have any of Siebel’s operational CRM software in place.
