Siebel, Lockheed Martin Align

Siebel Systems and Lockheed Martin have formed a strategic alliance to pursue business opportunities in the federal information technology market. According to Siebel the partnership formalizes ongoing efforts between the two companies and will target federal agencies looking to improve operational effectiveness and productivity. The terms of the agreement allow Lockheed Martin technical personnel to train and become certified on the implementation of Siebel eGovernment and Siebel Homeland Security applications. "As our nation faces a disturbing array of security concerns, improved threat detection and information sharing within and among agencies is critical to our national safety," Tom Siebel, chairman and CEO of Siebel Systems, said in a statement. "Our new partnership offers the software functionality, scalability, performance, and federal government expertise needed to meet some of the U.S. government's most-pressing challenges." Says Arthur Johnson, Lockheed Martin senior vice president of corporate strategic development: "This alliance enables government agencies to leverage [our] complimentary capabilities and expertise. The companies say the alliance will enable federal agencies to rapidly move toward an eGovernment model, incorporating commercial off-the-shelf technologies to meet the systems requirements of the U.S. military and civil government agencies. According to Siebel, its eGovernment Applications support a broad range of government work processes, including entitlements management, tax and revenue management, enforcement and compliance, healthcare services, logistics management, recruiting, training, education, and homeland security. Erin Kinikin, vice president and research leader of enterprise applications at Giga Information group, says that although Siebel's choice to align with Lockheed Martin is strategically sound, it does not necessarily guarantee that Siebel will be able to dominate the government sector. "The entry into the government sector has always been through the big systems integrators who know how to work the system and are on the right 'lists' of approved vendors," Kinikin says. "It's not just getting your product on the General Services Administration schedule, it's also having consulting resources who understand government processes and have the appropriate levels of security clearance--in sufficient number to handle a large implementation. Lockheed understands government and their issues, and can deliver on the scale that government requires. "What Lockheed has to do is accelerate Siebel's understanding of government beyond high-level contact management and entitlement checking," Kinikin adds. "The real question is whether Siebel can provide what governments need--scalable Web self-service implementations, deep-transaction integration, and the ability to deal with huge amounts of documents, images and other content, not just data .The partnership with Lockheed is a good step for Siebel, but it's not the only step by any means."