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Tom Siebel spreads the e-business gospel
Analysis/Commentary
Siebel serves as the St. John of the new business testament.
Holding a book of rules, a spate of tools, and a score of
insights, he has created one of the fastest-growing e-business
companies. Through his ability to communicate a consistent creed he
has led conferences, written for magazines, and launched two
best-selling books. (The latest is Cyber Rules: Strategies
for Excelling in E-business.)
Siebel puts his money where his mouth is. He runs his
company like a fanatic, using the word "professional" in
every other sentence, and generally comports himself like
a little general. No Frisbees in the halls, thank you,
just the ads of his customers' products. He supplies e-business
software to Ford, Marriott, and a score of other major
companies.
Siebel belongs to class of management vocationals
(one might say "lifers") that has taken up the religion of
process and speaks its technobabble: professionalism,
customer-centricity, and business as fact, not humanism. The survivalism that built towers, General Motors, and entertainment consortia lives on in this Prussianized view
of business and technology. But it succeeds, just as the
task-force oriented heroics of World War II succeeded in
procedurizing industrial life in Europe.
Nobody kids this non-kidder. His doctrines hold water. He foreshadows a time when humans will hone themselves into sophisticated
cogs via commerce, and live richer, if not better,
lives. If Siebel's dreams have their nightmarish side (his procedurized worldview), at least they plan on being inclusive of the masses.
So what does Siebel bring to the table? Software that
enables the transfer of information: the systems that call
up a customer's account, history, personality, and profit
ideals. Siebel's systems mechanize the processes of commercial
communication from sales systems that facilitate a cold call
to the software that links live customers to corporate back-ends.
Siebel does eCRM with a vengeance. (See Technology Beat for August 23, 2000: The lady behind
the counter is a database.)
Siebel Systems, Inc., begun in the early nineties and now a
public company, has been growing in large increments so that it
currently challenges software giants like Oracle and SAP. In the
business of business-to-business, the company has risen from challenger to
new champion.
August 30, 2000
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