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Siebel Systems Inc. and Electronic Data Systems Corp. this week
will announced a partnership to help companies avoid many of the
costs and complexities of managing customer relationship management
systems in enterprises.
The companies will announce EDS' plans to add Siebel's software
to its BPO (business process outsourcing) services. The pact calls
for EDS employees who run customer-facing business operations for
other companies, most typically contact centers, to use Siebel's
CRM applications.
Those Siebel applications will be integrated with other business
processes managed by EDS, such as human resources, supply chain and
inventory management, using Siebel's Universal Application Network
for business process integration between disparate applications,
said officials of both companies.
The move lets EDS extend its BPO offerings into the front office
as it adds Siebel's software—still the most widely used CRM software
despite three straight years of falling license revenues—to the mix
of applications it supports.
Siebel, meanwhile, gets a potential and much-needed new revenue
stream from current EDS clients, as well as a new way to reach
customers that lack the staff or expertise to manage a complex
enterprise CRM system.
The partnership is the first of many Siebel plans to ink in the
BPO arena, as the company expands its focus beyond license revenue
to include service revenue, according to Siebel officials in San
Mateo, Calif.
"[EDS] will get us into a different piece of the market," said
Butch Winters, Siebel vice president of alliances. "License revenue
is a short-term event. Most of [EDS'] contracts tend to be
long-term, seven to 10 years. We're quite thrilled to be a part of
those relationships.
"We're pretty serious about this [BPO] market," Winters said.
IDC, in Framingham, Mass., values the customer care BPO market at
$41 billion.
Saeed Hosseiniyar, vice president of IT in Alcatel's Enterprise
Networking Group, which has about 2,000 seats of Siebel's sales,
customer service and marketing applications, has little interest in
outsourcing his Siebel business processes.
"It's more cost-effective for us to run Siebel ourselves," said
Hosseiniyar in Calabasas, Calif. "We're a small group, we've been
running [Siebel applications] for five or six years now, we've
become very efficient. But if you're just looking to do CRM now and
you've got an implementation ahead of you, then you're more likely
to turn to outsourcing."
EDS, of Plano, Texas, will start offering Siebel applications as
part of its BPO offerings within six months.
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