Siebel CRM OnDemand Now Available in Europe; Siebel Systems and IBM Provide First and Only Hosted CRM Service that Delivers Stand-Alone and Prebuilt Hybrid Deployments

Business Wire, April 21, 2004

Business Editors/High-Tech Writers

Siebel User Week 2004

CANNES, France--(BUSINESS WIRE)--April 21, 2004

Siebel Systems, Inc. (Nasdaq:SEBL) and IBM Corp. (NYSE:IBM) today announced at Siebel User Week 2004, Cannes that Siebel CRM OnDemand is now available in Europe.

Siebel CRM OnDemand is the on demand hosted customer relationship management (CRM) service developed, marketed, sold, and delivered by Siebel Systems and IBM. Siebel CRM OnDemand is the industry's first and only hosted CRM Service that delivers a stand-alone and prebuilt hybrid deployment, providing customers with the unique option of integrating with Siebel Systems' market-leading on premise CRM applications software.

With support for the UK English, French, Spanish, Italian, and German languages, European companies can now leverage Siebel Systems' proven CRM capabilities in a hosted subscription-based service to sell, market, and serve customers in their native language.

"With more than 2.36 million Siebel CRM users worldwide, 82 Siebel offices in 28 countries, and more than 1,100 customers, Siebel and IBM are uniquely positioned to meet the large and growing demand for integrated hosted CRM solutions worldwide," said Mike Betzer, Vice President and General Manager, OnDemand Products, Siebel Systems. "This announcement signals a critical milestone toward delivering 'CRM for Everyone' -- CRM for any size company, in any industry, anywhere and in any language, and for any deployment option -- hosted, on premise, or a hybrid combination of both."

According to Gartner, Inc., there are more than 5 million small to midsize enterprises in Europe and the majority of those have yet to deploy a CRM solution.(1) Increasingly, sales and customer service professionals at these organizations, as well as those in divisions of larger companies or those with geographically distributed operations, must support global operations or do business with customers in diverse local markets. As a result, it is necessary to provide integrated CRM support regardless of where or how they conduct business.

"The expansion to include the European community underscores our commitment for delivering true on demand solutions for customers through our network of business partners," said Daniel Chaffraix, IBM General Manager, e-Business Hosting, EMEA. "Siebel Systems' market leadership in CRM combined with IBM's experience in delivering business processes via the Internet makes for a powerful combination."

Siebel Systems and IBM Raise the Bar for Hosted CRM

With this latest release, Siebel CRM OnDemand offers customers worldwide advanced globalization, prebuilt integration to the Siebel on premise solution via a hosted integration server, and real-time analytics complete with a prebuilt data warehouse. In addition, Siebel CRM OnDemand is delivered to customers by IBM's e-business Hosting(TM) Services, which provides a reliable and security-enhanced hosting environment that businesses have come to trust. The service incorporates IBM's industry-leading best practices, processes, and methodologies for hosting and managing Siebel applications, honed by more than 1,100 joint Siebel and IBM customer engagements.

Key Siebel CRM OnDemand capabilities include:

Globalization and European Language Support

To address the needs of a global workforce, Siebel CRM OnDemand now supports UK English, German, Spanish, French, and Italian, allowing organizations to enter, process, and retrieve customer information in their native language.

Siebel CRM OnDemand provides multilingual, multicurrency, and regional settings support, enabling organizations to deploy in multiple languages while maintaining a single unified repository of customer data. Multicurrency support allows users to transact, forecast, aggregate, and report in any currency.

A Hosted CRM Industry First: Hosted Integration Server

Defining the next generation of application integration capabilities, Siebel CRM OnDemand delivers the industry's first fully hosted enterprise application integration server. With prebuilt integrations to popular applications such as Siebel business applications installed on premise, this capability enables organizations to rapidly extend their existing Siebel CRM deployment to a hybrid model without having to resort to traditional time-consuming and expensive custom development efforts and without having to deploy sophisticated integration servers on their own premises. By delivering true real-time integration capabilities, Siebel CRM OnDemand's hosted integration server goes far beyond simple data sharing and uniquely enables companies to deploy end-to-end business processes across applications. In addition, Siebel CRM OnDemand also provides a comprehensive set of flexible Web Services APIs based on XML/SOAP standards to enable custom integrations between Siebel CRM OnDemand and other applications, further reducing the cost and complexity of custom integration.

A Hosted CRM Industry First: Hosted Analytic Server

Siebel CRM OnDemand also provides the industry's first hosted analytics server complete with a prebuilt data warehouse, delivering powerful analytic dashboards, prebuilt reports, and interactive analysis tools to every level of the organization. Unlike other hosted products that provide simple dashboards and reports that show only a snapshot in time, Siebel CRM OnDemand's prebuilt data warehouse provides organizations with powerful capabilities to evaluate current data in light of historical trends. For example, while simple reporting can only provide a list of current customers, Siebel CRM OnDemand can show how the demographics of a customer base have changed over time, identify trends in a customer's purchasing preferences, and show which customers are spending more this year versus last year.