Enterprise software Observer has an Interview with oracle's Anthony Lye on Siebel, Excerpts from the same:

• Siebel really is the center piece both from a product perspective as well as a personnel perspective. We are driving a very interesting and very influential CRM strategy that is helping our customers move towards customer centric business processes and customer centric enterprises. We are also talking in big numbers. As a combined company Oracle has 16,000 CRM customers, over 5,000,000 deployed agents, and over 150,000,000 registered self service users. We are still deploying in excess of 300,000 new agents a quarter.
• They are pleased that Siebel is the lead product in Oracle's go-to-market applications strategy for new CRM opportunities. No one really doubted anything else but they wanted to hear it directly from Oracle. I would say unanimously that every single customer I visited is seeing resurgence in our product strategy and product roadmap.
• A positive and growing economy pushes corporate strategies towards the acquisition of more customers and growth from their existing customers. This in turn tends to push them towards a front office investment strategy that Gartner and Forrester have been talking about for years. Our Customers now also view CRM less as a one time event and have become more interested in the architecture and long term plans than they were before. Today companies realize the frequency of change in their business and the supporting business processes have risen dramatically.
• "I think by far and away the biggest thing that will happen in CRM over the next 5 years is the customer and partner enablement of business processes or 'self service'. Different verticals may be subject to some specific industry trends but more and more of the business processes will be pushed closer and closer to the customer in every CRM market space."
• What is interesting Bruce is the amount of business we are winning from SAP customers. Given the market change from a negative economy to a positive economy SAP is actually positioning itself towards a customer acquisition and customer growth strategy which I think is a real challenge for them given their product. So even in Germany where SAP has been so strong historically, we continue to deploy our products in a lot of their flagship accounts. In these organizations the bulk of the business in CRM is still in what I think of as the deep industry front office segment.
• Portal is a very specific application with a very specific value proposition to a number of specific industries. This is logical if you look at the industries Oracle wants to target aggressively. Our strategy is very much around providing a single application footprint suite integrated and developed by one vendor. This is just what companies that have pioneered new technologies and are now basing a large part of their business on increasingly mature technologies expect.

Source: ESOFTO

Prashanth Rai