Siebel's New CEO Sees CRM Provider More As Partner Than VendorSiebel's New CEO Sees CRM Provider More As Partner Than Vendor

On the job for just five months, Siebel Systems Inc. CEO Mike Lawrie is recasting the struggling customer-relationship-management software pioneer as more of a partner in its customers' success, a strategy applauded by customers at a company user conference this week.

Lawrie told some 3,000 attendees in Los Angeles that Siebel recognizes technology by itself can't alone achieve a successful CRM deployment. "CRM is not a product. CRM is not an event," Lawrie said. "It's a business strategy to drive companies closer to their customers."

After 10 years of being known primarily as a supplier of packaged CRM applications, Siebel Systems now intends to work more closely with its customers to ensure that their deployments deliver the desired business results. One of the key ways it's doing that is to use standards like XML Web services to work with customers to build custom applications composed of software components taken from existing Siebel products. Siebel disclosed it had expanded its relationship with IBM to create a joint global delivery center designed to tighten the collaboration between the two companies when they work together.

The goal of the new strategy, Lawrie says in an interview, is to more effectively map CRM deployments to customers' specific business processes, and to address the 41% of Siebel customers who, when surveyed recently, said they didn't get the desired results from their Siebel deployments. "The value proposition for enterprise application providers is changing," he says. "People are interested in results, in business outcomes." And Siebel, he says, needs to play a more active role in helping customers achieve those outcomes.

Ken Casey, senior VP of retail banking delivery for Canadian bank ATB Financial, likes that message. A Siebel customer since choosing the vendor's call-center software in 2000, ATB has invested $6 million in hardware, software, and integration work for its 200-seat call center. The return on investment has been several times that expenditure, Casey says, thanks to a 35% increase in sales referrals, a 25% improvement in call-center efficiency, and a 50% rise in call-center revenue. But it wasn't easy getting there, and he expects future Siebel implementations to be less painful under Lawrie's new model. "The change in Siebel to a solutions company from a software company is huge for us," says Casey. "We see a Siebel that's easy to do business with, and they haven't been." ATB's situation will test that theory: Casey is waiting for Siebel to integrate its proprietary call-center software with the Java 2 Enterprise Edition-based retail banking application it acquired when it bought Eontec Ltd. in April. Casey had signed on to become an Eontec customer just days before the acquisition was disclosed.

Siebel's new strategy should also prove helpful when General Motor's Saab Cars USA unit upgrades its Siebel CRM deployment next year to comply with a GM-wide CRM initiative, says Patrik Riese, director of CRM for General Motors unit Saab Cars USA. In the past, Siebel would have left Saab to work solely with systems integrators on customizing the deployment and integrating it with its other systems. Now, Siebel will bring its industry expertise and deeper knowledge of the software direct to the customer. "I think that's moving in the right direction," Riese says. "No matter how much they've trained their integrators, they didn't design the software."