Siebel And Teradata Strike AllianceSiebel And Teradata Strike Alliance

Two vendors are working to make it easier to manage and analyze large volumes of customer data. Customer-relationship management application vendor Siebel Systems Inc. announced Tuesday an alliance with Teradata, NCR Corp.'s data-warehouse systems division, under which the two are closely integrating their technologies.

Siebel and Teradata executives said in a conference call the alliance was driven by key customers, including DirecTV, the Royal Bank of Canada, and Union Pacific Railroad, who use products from the two companies.

A report issued by Ventana Research following the announcement says the Siebel-Teradata partnership will benefit businesses that need to perform complex analysis chores on large volumes of data. But the report also noted that the deal could create some market confusion given that Teradata has its own set of CRM analytical applications.

The deal calls for tightly linking Siebel's analytical applications with Teradata's data warehouse. Siebel's analytical applications, including sales, marketing, and customer-analysis software, are based on technology Siebel acquired when it bought nQuire Software Inc. in 2001. Sales of those applications grew nearly 90% between the first quarter of 2003 and the first quarter of 2004, and now account for 20% of Siebel's total sales.

Siebel already has added code to its application base product, known as the Siebel Enterprise Analytics Platform, that generates SQL queries specific to the Teradata database and makes use of Teradata's specialized built-in analytical functions. In the third quarter Siebel will ship versions of the individual analytical applications tailored for Teradata data warehouses.

The two vendors also are developing for a third-quarter release an integration methodology for linking Teradata's industry-specific logical data models with Siebel's application data models, a step that will make joining the two systems easier and minimize data redundancy. Although the companies didn't put a dollar value on the partnership, they said it includes engineering, service and consulting, sales and marketing, and customer-training resources.

Also Tuesday, Siebel moved to strengthen its position in the banking industry by acquiring Ireland-based Eontec Ltd., a developer of multichannel retail-banking applications. Siebel paid $70 million in cash upfront for the company and will pay an additional amount of up to $60 million based on revenue and contractual milestones in 2005. Siebel is well-entrenched in the financial-services industry, which accounted for 24% of all license revenue last quarter.