Siebel 7 Ships
eBusiness applications provider Siebel Systems today shipped its long-awaited Siebel 7, featuring the company's new, Web-based architecture, numerous upgrades to its applications and the certification of over 100 software partners.
The suite of 198 applications is built on Siebel's fully hosted Smart Web Architecture, which integrates the best of both the Web and desktop applications, the company said. The hosted architecture reduces the costs traditionally associated with desktop installations while allowing for rapid upgrades, according to Siebel. But the company says its suite is more accessible and interactive than other hosted e-services, providing many of the features of desktop suites such as drag-and-drop capabilities and eliminating the need to restore the browser when updating fields.
Like its predecessors, Siebel 7 is a suite built of an application network that customers can pick and choose to fit their needs. Over 100 third-party software providers have announced plans to certify with Siebel 7 and offer their support, the company said. Siebel also configures and translates all the applications in a given suite to fit the regional settings of a customer in any of 20 languages.
The Siebel 7 core suite features a number of upgrades to its offerings. Siebel has added a number of forecasting and analysis tools to its long-time workhorse, Siebel Sales 7. In addition, the new release of Siebel Sales now supports the Palm OS platform for sales teams on the go. The marketing department will note that Siebel Marketing 7 can be used to integrate data from external sources such as legacy systems and NCR Teradata for customer segmentation, the company said.
Siebel has also added additional call center functionality to its latest release. The company has leveraged its new Web architecture by placing the Call Center 7 in a low-bandwidth, browser-based application designed to improve download time for customer data. Call Center 7 also includes a new persistent customer dashboard and a consolidated search center for agents.
The company boasts additional improvements to its field service, e-service and PRM offerings as well.
The upgrade to Siebel 7 has been extensively tested through "thousands of upgrades," the company said in a statement. In addition, Siebel says the suite features an is automated upgrade process designed to simplify future implementations.
Siebel plans to ship Siebel Industry Applications 7, a collection of pre-packaged suites for 20 verticals including financial services, energy, life sciences and the public sector, later this year.
"By shipping the industry's highest-quality
customer and employee relationship management solutions currently available
in the industry, we continue to extend our market leadership in every
product category," said Thomas M. Siebel, Chairman and CEO, Siebel.
"As more organizations recognize the
importance of focusing their organizations and resources on attracting,
retaining, and growing customers, there is no question that the CRM market
will continue to grow significantly faster than all other eBusiness
applications segments."
www.siebel.com