October 7, 2005

IN THE NEWS
Siebel Systems announced preliminary financial results for the third quarter ending Sept. 30, 2005. The company expects total revenues for the quarter to be approximately $346 million (up from $313.6 million last quarter), license revenues of $112 million (up from $78.3 million), maintenance revenues of $125 million (up from $122.8 million), and services and other revenues of $109 million (down from $112.5 million). "[These] results demonstrate encouraging progress against the goals we established when I joined the company six months ago," said CEO George Shaheen in a written statement. "We have made significant changes to our leadership team and increased the rigor of our monthly and weekly management practices. Our company is on the right track to improve our revenue-generation capability, better align our cost structure with the scale of our business, and invest in the products and technology that will keep Siebel at the forefront of the CRM industry." Official financial results are expected later this month.

Metastorm and CommerceQuest have merged under the Metastorm brand. Metastorm will integrate the other company's solutions into its BPM suite, allowing Metastorm BPM (formerly eWork) to support human-to-human and system-based processes across midsize and large companies on both Unix and Microsoft platforms.

NEW PRODUCTS
NetSuite unveiled a set of advanced features for CRM+ that allows for tracking multiple quotas and multiple forecasts in addition to the associated commission plans. "Customers need to be able to measure their sales teams by more than one metric, which is total sales," says Mini Peiris, senior director of product management for NetSuite. "[This tool] gives midmarket companies flexibility in how they are running their business" and removes the need for using Excel to forecast. The new capabilities are components of the Incentive Compensation add-on module, available immediately for an additional charge of $199 per month.

Business Objects launched BusinessObjects XI Release 2, which introduces Intelligent Question. The new tool provides customers with a simplified user interface that allows them to ask questions in straightforward business terms. For example, a sales executive can ask who his top-five customers of the quarter were. It also delivers a tailored experience for more personalized requirements, so that a product manager can define "My Products" to only include those for which he is responsible. The tool is expected to be available in the fourth quarter of 2005.

ClickTracks announced the upcoming release of version 6 of its Web analytics software. ClickTracks 6 offers a site archiver to capture a company's Web site as it exists at a given point in time and store it for future analysis, compressing it to one-tenth the size of the original site. It also provides time splits, allowing users to see visitor behavior on two different versions of their Web site on one screen. Funnel reporting lets users follow visitor and specified groups of visitors down the paths they take to the checkout page to see which pages are most effective at turning browsers into buyers.

ON THE MOVE
Salesforce.com has appointed Craig Conway to the company's board of directors, effective immediately. Conway most recently served as president and CEO of PeopleSoft. He also served as executive vice president of Oracle.

David Eichler has been named CFO of Intellisync. Blair Hankins joins the company as senior vice president of technology, client development.

CUSTOMER WINS
Angel.com announced that Captain D's, a restaurant chain, has selected Angel.com to build and deploy a phone-based customer satisfaction survey. The survey is meant to capture instant feedback from customers after they dine. It already has been deployed in 325 locations and a national rollout is planned in the near future.

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