Siebel Leads Gartner's B2B Magic Quadrant

Based on its top ranking in two of four of Gartner's Magic Quadrants, Siebel Systems has also been positioned in the Leader quadrant in Gartner's Business-to-Business CRM Suite Magic Quadrant for 2003. Gartner defines quadrant leaders as CRM vendors that are performing well today and have a clear vision of future market direction. Position in the quadrant reflects vendors' overall success in selling, deploying, supporting, and extending their applications. Leadership in the Gartner Magic Quadrants is also based to how much the software investment has helped customers achieve sales, service, and marketing goals. Gartner requires vendors to provide customer references across industries and geographies that have deployed an integrated CRM suite with measurable business and ROI benefits. The service suites fall into either B2B or B2C, according to Gareth Herschel, a research director for Gartner. Siebel took the leadership spot in both the Direct Sales Technology and the Sales Configuration Solutions Magic Quadrants. The company also scored well in the other functional areas of marketing, sales, and customer service, thus earning the CRM giant the leader slot in the B2B quadrant. "Siebel is a leader in suites because they have functionality in every category," Herschel says. "Their breadth of functionality is unequalled. They may not have scored well in every category, but they have something in nearly every category, which tends to boost their overall score." Herschel also says that Siebel's huge customer base of more than 3,500 is an asset. "Their market presence makes them look good," he says. "Siebel can roll out new technology and sell it to a couple of hundred customers in a few quarters, where as it would take most competitors longer than that to sell to 50 customers." SCS Magic Quadrant ranked 18 vendors on a variety of criteria, including the ability to provide reference customers, product configuration capabilities, and vertical industry expertise. To take the top spot, a vendors must have at least 30 global, cross-industry reference customers supporting a variety of complex order, product, and pricing configuration problems across all sales channels including mobile, call center, and Web, the report states. The DST magic quadrant report evaluated and positioned 12 vendors in the Direct Sales Technology market based on eight key criteria including ease of use, support for both mobile field sales and telesales, and a scalable, Internet architecture. Gartner defines DST Leaders as vendors that provide multiple, successful global deployments with proven ROI; offer complete and industry specific functionality for sales execution, operations, and analytics; and demonstrate compelling future vision. Herschel says the challenge for Siebel going forward is to "recognize that tough economic times have many customers taking a phase implementation approach, and a phased strategy is not a best-of-breed strategy."