If you haven't upgraded from version 6 of Siebel CRM software, the newest version of Siebel's CRM software may be just the reason to finally do so. Described by analysts as something between a major upgrade and a minor point release, Siebel's CRM version 7.7 reportedly will provide smoother administrative features, a more user-friendly interface and greater analytics capabilities. It is scheduled to hit the market in the spring.
"Version 7.7 is the first compelling reason to move to Siebel 7.x," says Erin Kinikin, a vice president and research director for Cambridge, Mass.-based Forrester Research. "It's not that there's a ton of new functionality, but Siebel has done a great job of really focusing on usability and cost of ownership."
According to Kinikin and other analysts, version 7.7 is a better package for risk-averse Siebel 6 customers, as well as newcomers weighing Siebel CRM against competing products. Specifically, this latest installment of Siebel's CRM software provides improvements in
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cost of ownership (TCO), enhanced end-user functionality, and embedded analytics features.
Easier configuration and administration
Siebel says that version 7.7 of its CRM software offers a 39% reduction in TCO. Whether that benchmark will hold up when it comes to real-life customer deployments, however, remains to be seen. But analysts agree that the company has worked hard to make life cheaper and easier for IT administrators by adding features such as wizards for setup and configuration.
"It's a more friendly administration environment," says Steve Bonadio, senior program director for the Meta Group's enterprise application strategies unit. "I can do the same things I could before, but much more simply, such as managing sales hierarchies and territories, or improving the synchronization process between the server and remote clients."
Kinikin agrees. "[When] people went to Siebel 7 [from Siebel 6], there were suddenly a lot more pieces," she says. "You had the Internet servers and the load-balancing servers, and you had to worry about increased network loads and different performance characteristics. It was pretty overwhelming. One of the big goals of 7.7 is to open Siebel up to casual end users and departmental administrators who aren't deep techies. This is a great release for the Siebel 6 user looking for a smoother transition -- part of it even looks more like Siebel 6."
Friendlier interface
Additional navigational aids, such as the iHelp embedded assistant, make tasks easier for end users of 7.7. IHelp, which is accessible from anywhere in the application, gives users context-sensitive help on how to complete tasks. Other user aids include simplified forms, support for the browser back button, a universal inbox to centralize all messages (including voice messages and e-mails), and customized homepages for different types of users.
"Typically, what happened in the past when you [installed] Siebel is that everything [showed] up on the screen, and you [had] to configure down," explains Curt Lockton, general manager of Siebel's manufacturing product line. "We're trying to now provide the five or 10 things that someone in, say, the call center, needs, and let them turn on more functionality as they need it."
Kinikin says that customized approach makes the interface less intimidating.
"With salespeople who are process-averse, their eyes just glazed over," Kinikin says. "We were seeing companies spend more money to take functionality out of Siebel than to put functionality in."
Embedded analytics
Besides the new 7.7 analytics package that Siebel announced, the company has also embedded many analytical capabilities into the main CRM application.
"Line-of-business users are able to not only get data, but also to understand the implications of the data," says Denis Pombriant, vice president and research director for CRM at the Aberdeen Group. "There are a lot of dashboard-type features on the user interface -- graphical representations not only of a single data point but [of] how the data looks in aggregate relation to other things, such as time, for example."
Sheryl Kingstone, a CRM analyst with the Yankee Group, credits Siebel with trying to put more basic analytics capabilities into the hands of business users.
"Analytics powers every aspect of the application, whether it's in the customer service application or the sales application," she says. "It doesn't replace the kind of modeling that a statistician or brand manager would do, but [it]does push down a lot of functionality to the line-of-business user."
Siebel's Lockton adds that the dashboard analytics are also tailored to each industry: "Each industry has its own analytic dashboards, with the tasks and metrics unique to that industry."
Deeper vertical functionality
In its quest to continue being a leader in vertical CRM products, Siebel has deepened the functionality of approximately half its vertical packages, Lockton says. For example, Siebel's automotive application will include a feature that will enable dealers to manage the life cycles of auto leases. The hospitality package now has an event- management module that will allow hotel managers to keep track of space usage and room bookings for a particular function, and to conduct a profitability analysis for an individual event.
The bridge to 8.0?
According to Bonadio, version 7.7 may be the last major release before 8.0, which will likely involve native versions for Microsoft's .NET platform and the J2EE platform. But, he says, the move from 7.7 to 8.0 is likely to be much smoother than the migration users faced when going from 6.0 to 7.0.
"This will be a much more evolutionary process, rather than a disruptive or revolutionary process," he said. "Siebel is already adding technology enhancements to 7.7, such as support for JMS and embedding a Java Virtual Machine, to move it to the next generation of Siebel."
Kingstone adds that Siebel will need such a dual-platform strategy to gain acceptance in the midmarket as well as in large enterprises.
"I'd suggest they focus on J2EE first and less on .NET," she says. "But companies today tend to have mixed environments, so Siebel will need to be able to coexist with both. And they've committed to supporting both."
This was first published in December 2003