Business Services Industry

Siebel CRM OnDemand Replaces Salesforce.com at Sirona Dental CEREC Sales Division in Germany

Business Wire, Jan 24, 2006

SAN MATEO, Calif. -- Leading Dental Equipment Developer Selects Siebel CRM OnDemand for Its Intuitive Functionality, Price/Performance Ratio, and Service and Support

Siebel Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ:SEBL), a leading provider of customer-facing solutions, today announced that the German CEREC Sales Division of Sirona Dental Systems GmbH, a leading developer of dental equipment, has replaced Salesforce.com with Siebel CRM OnDemand. The German division deployed Salesforce.com in October 2004 but found that user adoption was poor. Following the deployment of Siebel CRM OnDemand the CEREC sales team now has a clear picture of dealers' requirements. The intuitive nature of Siebel CRM OnDemand, along with the training and support offered by Siebel Systems, has spurred widespread user adoption.

"Salesforce.com is optimized for direct sales and is not a good fit for an organization, such as ours, that has specialist dealers. Our resellers send us information concerning their customers' requirements that we then load on to our system to enable efficient delivery. When using Salesforce.com, importing that data from our dealers was always problematic," said Marcus Hoffmann, Sales Manager CEREC, Sirona Dental Germany. "I, and the rest of my team, have found that Siebel CRM OnDemand is extremely intuitive and now even previously resistant members of my team have been won over by Siebel."

Sirona Dental Systems GmbH was founded in 1997 as a result of a private equity buyout of the former dental division of Siemens AG. With headquarters in Bensheim, Sirona employs more than 1,600 people in Germany and several international locations. Due primarily to successful international expansion and the intensification of its sales activities, revenues in the financial year 2003/04 rose to EUR 320 million as compared to EUR 284 million the previous year. The CEREC division is responsible for the world-acclaimed dental workstation that integrates hardware and software to provide dentists, and patients, with superior treatment capabilities.

Sirona evaluated a number of potential replacements for its CRM solution. The user-friendly interface and the strong price/performance ratio of the Siebel solution convinced Hoffman. Siebel CRM OnDemand not only had a significantly lower cost than Salesforce.com, but also had greater functionality.

It took Hoffman, who is not an IT professional, just three hours to import the CEREC data into Siebel CRM OnDemand and become operational. "The import functions of Siebel are vastly superior to those of Salesforce.com. With Salesforce.com, I frequently had to pay a Salesforce.com consultant to import leads. Now, I do it myself," said Hoffman.

Siebel's hosted software solutions and deployment capabilities are a critical enabler of its new Customer Adaptive Solutions Applications Strategy and Architecture. Companies embracing Siebel Customer Adaptive Solutions will be able to more effectively and quickly anticipate customer needs, realign their customer-facing business processes for systemic and consistent improvement, and direct the right actions across their businesses to maximize customer satisfaction and profitability.

About Siebel CRM OnDemand

Siebel CRM OnDemand is a hosted CRM offering delivered over the Web and accessible from an Internet browser at a fixed price per user per month. Customers can deploy Siebel CRM OnDemand quickly, easily, and affordably without any up-front IT investments. Hosted by IBM, Siebel CRM OnDemand delivers complete sales, marketing, and service functionality; built-in customer analytics; virtual call center technology; embedded best practices; and world-class hosting services and support. Siebel CRM OnDemand is now available for purchase. For more information, visit www.crmondemand.com.

About Siebel Systems

Siebel Systems is a leading provider of software solutions and services that drive value and loyalty in client-customer relationships, providing best-in-class capabilities in on-premise and hosted customer relationship management (CRM), business analytics, and customer data integration. Siebel's new Customer Adaptive Solutions enable organizations to model their customer-centric business processes in order to drive the most effective customer interactions, gain increased insight over time, and continually realign those processes for systemic and consistent improvement. With more than $2 billion in R&D investments, 11-plus years of customer software experience, an extensive global ecosystem of alliance partners, and more than 4,000 customers and 3.7 million live users, Siebel is the proven choice in helping organizations of all types and sizes achieve customer-driven business results. For more information, visit www.siebel.com.