Beagle Research Group: Oracle-Siebel First Reaction

Companies I Like

Centive
Centive is in a dog fight with several other compensation management vendors such as Xactly and Callidus. What I like about Centive is that they are based on a solid architecture thatmakes them very scalable. More importantly though, Centive has a big picture idea of compensation as a strategic tool and their system aims at not just getting the sales representatives paid but also at helping managers develop plans and manage territories. Watch Centive develop into a company that does a lot more than ensure the accuracy of the commission check.
Communispace
You know those little 100 calorie snacks that help dieters stick to their regimines? Ever wonder where they came from or who got the idea? They were the result of involving customers in the product development process through innovative on-line focus groups hosted by Communispace. This company has a knack for bringing customers and vendors together to share ideas and capture "The Voice of the Customer." Lots of major companies are flocking to Communispace because they're on to something.
Eloqua
Eloqua is bringing a true methodology to marketing and customers are showing great results. Rather than blindly sending out email or generating tactical campaigns designed to find low hanging fruit, Eloqua's approach is to conduct marketing that establishes a dialog that naturally results in more leads and more efficient closes. This on demand tool is closely integrated with Salesforce.com and other implementations are coming soon.
Firepond
This is cool. In an era when we spend more and more time and effort focused on governance and compliance issues too many companies rely on spreadsheets to configure and price complex solutions. The result? Orders with missing parts, too many parts, the wrong parts. Also, who is in charge of pricing and disscounts? All the time? What falls through the cracks? Do you know? Fixing the situation is often labor intensive and expensive. Better to avoid them in the first place. Firepond is a CPQ -- configuration, pricing and quotation tool that no sales organization should be without. It generates accurate quotes fast and everything that goes on in it is auditable. Gotta like that...
Kadient
Kadient is another company in the mold of trying to improve how we sell. There is no doubt about the primacy of SFA but increasingly it is not enough. Sales people are continuously looking for resources and best practices and often sales departments are short on the systems and techniques of organizing such information. As a result, reps rely on email to each other and brute force effort to re-invent the wheel each time a presentation or proposal needs to be created. Kadient's solutions enable sales people to work smarter and therefore faster. The result is more and better shots on goal. Who wouldn't vote for that?
NetSuite
I like what NetSuite does. One stop for accounting, e-commerce and CRM. For a small or emerging company, NetSuite can deliver all of the functionality it needs to inventory product, run all of the accounting functions and all the CRM as well as eCommerce. Pretty good. The company is doing well and is poised for an IPO. I look for them to make a lot of noise in the near future.
Sage Software
Lots of us forget that the most used contact management software solutions is ACT! with more then 2.5 million users. Sage owns ACT! as well as SageCRM (formerly ACCPAC), and SalesLogix -- CRM for every budget. But they also own a lot of back office accounting software like the MAS series, Simply Accounting, and PeachTree accounting -- accounting for every budget. They have a powerful combination of solutions for SOHO, SMB and mid-size companies. Worth paying attention to.
Salesforce.com
I've been covering these guys since the earth cooled and I have always believed the OnDemand model would be a major disruptive innovation. They have a few rough edges but if you want to start a successful software company you could do a lot worse.

September 13, 2005

Oracle-Siebel First Reaction

What does this deal mean for the future of the CRM industry?

I think it's important to take a deep breath and understand that although ownership has changed, that is largely a financial matter the financial economy is not the 'real' economy where products and services are bought and sold so that companies can do useful work. That said, I think it opens up a lot of opportunity it puts more substance behind CRM and Siebel. Oracle had been a #3 or #4 player in CRM and I don't think acquiring Peoplesoft was the knockout punch that Oracle needed to become dominant in the space. But now with Siebel in the stable they have the #1 CRM provider with a great deal of overlap into the same enterprise customers Oracle has always sold to and the Oracle-Siebel Peoplesoft combination gives that combination the critical mass it needs to compete with SAP on the high end and others like Salesforce.com on the low end. Nevertheless, There is also plenty of risk inherent in this combination. Oracle
now has a combination of some very good products that don't automatically work well
together. It's sort of like having a Porsche engine disassembled on your garage
floor. Putting it all together is going to be critical. Meanwhile none of the
competition is standing still.

Is this a smart move for Oracle?

No, it's stupid, frankly.

I have previously said that Oracle had lost its ability to innovate when it bought Peoplesoft. It would be better, I think, for a company like Oracle to invent something than try to take the Lego route. But obviously, Oracle decided that it was more expedient to buy the Legos and put something really big together. This is all too reminescent of the Comoputer Associates era when CA bought up mainframe software companies and milked their maintenance streams. Long term this is bad for Oracle and bad for Siebel but probably great for Salesforce.com, RightNow and many other on demand CRM vendors.

What does this mean for existing Siebel customers?

Not much. Part of taking a deep breath is to remember that the software these customers have still works, it's didn't expire at mid-night. Since many of these companies already have relationships with Oracle it might be greeted with a major yawn. The biggest question I have is what about IBM? Siebel is a partner with IBM in the on demand space. IBM sells Siebel CRM OnDemand and hosts it. How will this event affect that relationship?

Will there be any real choice left in enterprise CRM?

I think this leaves plenty of 'choice' in Enterprise CRM -- Siebel continues to be a strong product and brand, SAP has new strength and companies like Salesforce.com have moved up in the pecking order. Salesforce has been making great strides in the enterprise and it wouldn't surprise me if this event lends more clarity to the enterprise decision -- to host or not to host becomes the biggest question. If that logic prevails, might it mean that CRM becomes more likely to be the application that enterprises host? And therefore might Salesforce.com be considered on a completely equal footing with the traditional vendors? This is a major positive for Salesforce.com.

Posted on September 13, 2005 at 10:12 AM | Permalink

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July 2008

What I'm reading

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Thomas H. Davenport: Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning
Read this book. I offers lots of insights on how companies are using analytics technology today to manage and most importantly to see the future of their businesses. Recent acquisition of the remaining analytics companies by titans like Oracle, SAP and others shows how important they think analytics will be in the years ahead. Lots of application to CRM. See why. (****)
Jen O'connell: Cell Phone Decoder Ring
Full disclosure: I know this author. I like her too, she's smart and a rising media star. Jen O'Connell is going to do for cell phones and other communication technologies what Martha and Suze did for entertaining and finance. It's about time too. If you've ever felt stupid trying to figure out how to use your cell phone or just what the difference is between GSM and the Gross Domestic Product, this book is for you. Full of insights and advice about how your phone works and how to work with your phone. (*****)
Eric D. Beinhocker: Origin of Wealth: Evolution, Complexity, and the Radical Remaking of Economics
Like Paul Ormerod, Eric Beinhocker is another economist exploring the relationship between evolution and the dismal science. Beinhocker is just as readable as Ormerod but offers more research in support of the evolutionary-economics thesis than any other economist that I have read. In dealing with evolution in economics Beinhocker ventures deeply into a new field called complexity economics that does for this field what General Relativity did for physics. I'd read it again. (*****)
Walter Isaacson: Einstein: His Life and Universe
Wow! I bought this book in San Francisco and read it all the way home. That's not to say that it's a potboiler, it's biography afterall, but Einstein was one of the great minds of the modern era and it is fun to retrace his life, to understand his genius as well as his all to human foibles. The author also does a credible job of making Special and General Relativity understandable to the average reader. Good stuff. (*****)
Al Gore: The Assault on Reason
Ok, I try not to be political in anything i do in business but, hey, I consider myself a fairly logical guy and the political environment of the last few years has, shall we say, defied logic. Regardless of what you think of Gore, his arguements are pretty good. (*****)
Paul Ormerod: Butterfly Economics: A New General Theory of Social and Economic Behavior
Anything by this accomplished economics writer will be thought provoking and entertaining. He's done a lot of work explaining the intersection of economics and evolutionary thought. Economics is, like many social sciences a study in human behavior as much as anything else and this slim volume is a great way to get started updating your thinking about this science. Still think economics follows strict rules and formulae like Physics? Read this book. (****)
Geoffrey A. moore: Dealing with Darwin
Geoffrey Moore has done it again. In this book he takes aim at the ways established companies can effectively compete on "main street". Like earlier books, "Inside the Tornado," and "Crossing the Chasm," which deal with how companies develop into market leaders, this book examines strategies for effectively dealing with the world we live in now, which is not about exponential growth but the indefinite equilibrium point of continuing to understand and meet customer needs. (*****)
Fred Reichheld: The Ultimate Question: Driving Good Profits and True Growth
Fred has been studying loyalty for a long time and he has championed ideas like the Net Promoter Score (NPS) which is a simple measure of whether your customers are happy and willing to tell others about you or not. Great companies have high positive scores, others don't. A simple idea that has a lot of traction. (****)
Lynne Truss: Talk to the Hand: The Utter Bloody Rudeness of the World Today, or Six Good Reasons to Stay Home and Bolt the Door
Yes, it's a book about manners, though not the kind to give any guidance about your salad fork. This is about impersonalizing influences in our lives. At the top of the list is technology. Without talking about CRM directly, Truss makes more than a few valid points about how technology associated with CRM is driving us nuts. Automated phone systems come in for a hit but so do surly store clerks, and, sadly, our fellow citizens making use of the public commons. In its own humorous way, it gives a lot to think about. (****)
Eric von Hippel: Democratizing Innovation
First, you can get this as a free download if you don't mind reading a book in PDF. It's worth reading too. Von Hippel looks at some of the things we don't do with customers right now that we might want to do. For example, "free sharing" might sound a bit dorky but only until you realize that he's really taking about co-innovation -- asking the customer about needs before building product. Given the fact that something like 80% of the 36,000+ new products that hit the shelves in 2005 were projected to fail, this guy might have a point. (****)