Siebel Systems Introduces New Customer Analytic Applications(email this article)

SAN DIEGO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Oct. 8, 2003-- Siebel Systems (Company Profile, Past Stories, Case Studies), Inc. (Nasdaq:SEBL - News) today announced a series of new and enhanced customer analytic applications. With Siebel Customer Analytic Applications 7.7, Siebel adds new guided analytics and business process integration, expanded vertical solutions, disconnected analytic capabilities for mobile users, and numerous analytic platform enhancements to its market-leading customer analytic applications. Additionally, Siebel is introducing new intelligent customer interaction applications, which apply predictive and descriptive analytics to affect customer treatment and interaction in real time.

Building lasting high-value relationships with customers is critical for business success. Improving an organization's ability to acquire more of the right kind of customers, to better serve and retain them, and to maximize their value will result in significant bottom-line benefits and has the potential to create lasting competitive advantage. Realizing this potential, however, requires expanding the focus beyond improved efficiencies in customer-facing processes to applying advanced business intelligence and analytics. These technologies transform customer and enterprise data into insights to drive customer interactions and employee actions. Organizations must now expand the scope of what it means to be "customer-driven" to also include being truly "insight-driven." Delivering this value is the focus of the Siebel Analytics product family, which represents a critical component in Siebel Systems' overall CRM offering.

"With our Customer Analytic Application family of products, we are providing organizations with the ability to derive the next level of business value, ROI, and competitive advantage from their customer relationship management initiatives," said David Schmaier, Executive Vice President, Siebel Systems. "This major new release reflects our commitment to extending our leadership in customer analytics, through innovation, investment, and a resolute focus on customer needs and success."

Since introducing the Siebel Analytics 7 product family in December of 2001, Siebel has experienced very rapid growth and broad adoption by leading companies across all industries -- confirming the significant business value and competitive differentiation of Siebel's analytic solutions. In July 2003, IDC recognized Siebel as the market share leader in customer analytic applications, which is forecasted to be the fastest-growing segment of the analytic applications and business intelligence market. IDC also cited Siebel Systems as the fastest-growing major company across all analytic application and business intelligence market segments.

Siebel Customer Analytic Applications 7.7 is a comprehensive set of products designed to provide complete customer and business insight, enabling insight-driven actions and intelligent customer interactions. These solutions are tailored to the unique analytic needs of customer-facing functions across a wide range of industries and reflect built-in knowledge of industry-specific needs, processes, and best practices. The applications enable organizations to more effectively attract, sell, service, and retain customers and to better monitor and manage overall customer and business performance. The results are increased business effectiveness and results across the customer life cycle. This release includes major new products and enhancements, including:

New Intelligent Customer Interaction Analytic Applications -- This new family of applications brings powerful data mining and descriptive analytic capabilities directly and in real time into Siebel's industry-leading CRM applications. With Siebel's Intelligent Customer Interaction applications, organizations can improve customer retention, reduce churn, execute more targeted and effective customer acquisition programs with powerful clustering and segmentation, and increase customer value through analytically driven cross-sell and up-sell recommendations. These applications include a series of industry-specific data models, analytical models, and templates developed together with industry leaders. Additionally, all of this functionality is exposed via Web Services APIs, enabling integration with any J2EE or .NET application.

New and Expanded Industry Analytic Applications -- Siebel Analytic Applications now cover 21 different industries, with new and enhanced applications for various segments of financial services, life sciences, communications, consumer goods, and high technology. These applications include data models encompassing industry-specific data beyond Siebel CRM data, key industry metrics, and guided analytics and workflow incorporating industry best-practice processes. These solutions enable organizations to address important industry issues, such as customer performance and churn detection in telecommunications, customer value and share of wallet in financial services, fact- based selling and trade promotion performance in consumer goods, and physician and product opportunity identification in pharmaceuticals.

New Mobile/Disconnected Analytic Application Support -- Also new is support for a full range of analytic functionality for mobile users while operating on a disconnected mobile computing device. By leveraging and extending Siebel's patented synchronization and upgrade technologies, Siebel Analytic Applications can now be deployed, managed, and administered from a single place, regardless of the size of the mobile user community. These patented technologies provide optimized data transfer and automate the process of deploying changes to mobile application users.

New Guided Analytics and Business Process Integration -- With new guided analytics, users can be led along a path to discovery and action, based on their role. This is enabled by providing intelligent links and analytic alerts and workflows that lead a user to the next logical step or action in an analysis. These guided analytics are delivered with prebuilt analytic applications and can also be easily adapted for customer-specific needs. Organizations can encapsulate the knowledge and expertise of their best employees in the usage of information and use guided analytics to bring all others to this high level of skill and ability. Additionally, with this new release, analytics functionality is directly integrated with Siebel's proven CRM business processes.

Significant BI and Analytic Platform Enhancements -- Enhancements to the prebuilt Relationship Management Data Warehouse ETL programs and the new Data Warehouse Administration Console provide significant performance improvements to meet the needs of even the largest and most data-intensive customers. With parallel ETL plan execution, high performance loading, optimizations in incremental updates, and enhanced scheduling and management, load and update times have been reduced considerably. Also, Siebel Customer Analytic Applications benefit from usability, scalability, and flexibility and the rich set of analytic capabilities that are part of the new release of Siebel's Enterprise BI and Analytics platform on top of which these applications are delivered (see separate press release).

"In today's competitive market, with brand loyalty at an all-time low and customer churn on the rise, companies require comprehensive applications to drive insight and intelligent, real-time customer interactions," said Henry Morris of IDC. "With this release of a robust predictive analytics capability, insight-driven business process integration, and enhanced performance and platform support, Siebel has delivered a complete vision and signalled its commitment to the customer analytics market."

"We have been able to deliver vastly improved insight to our sales professionals, business planners, and management through our deployment of Siebel Analytics," said Tim Court, Director, Technical Solutions at Cable and Wireless. "We are very excited about Siebel's new release, including the predictive analytics capabilities. These new solutions will enable us to take our deployment to the next level of value and help our marketing and sales teams do a better job of targeting new opportunities and increasing our share of wallet within existing customers."

Customers of Siebel Analytics include many of the largest, most discriminating and analytically sophisticated companies across virtually all industries including AXA Financial; Blue Cross Blue Shield of Florida; BMW Financial Services; BT Plc; Cisco; The Clorox Services Company; DaimlerChrysler; Fleet Boston Financial Corporation; GE Medical; General Motors; Honeywell Aerospace; Royal Bank of Canada; Telecom Italia; Union Pacific Railroad Company; United Health Care; and Verizon Global Solutions.

Siebel Customer Analytics Applications 7.7 is targeted for availability later this quarter. For more information, visit www.siebel.com.

About Siebel Systems

Siebel Systems, Inc. is a leading provider of business applications software, enabling corporations to sell to, market to, and serve customers across multiple channels and lines of business. With more than 3,500 customer deployments worldwide, Siebel Systems provides organizations with a proven set of industry-specific best practices, CRM applications, market-leading analytics products, and business processes, empowering them to consistently deliver superior customer experiences and establish more profitable customer relationships. Siebel Systems' sales and service facilities are located in more than 30 countries.

Except for the historical information contained herein, this press release contains forward-looking statements that involve risk or uncertainties. Future operating results of Siebel Systems may differ from the results discussed or forecasted in the forward-looking statements due to factors that include, but are not limited to, risks associated with customer relations, such as the availability of Siebel Systems' products and services, customer implementation of products and services, relationships with customers, third-party vendors and systems integrators, concentration of revenues in a relatively small number of customers, existence of errors or defects in products, ability to successfully manage growth, significant current and expected additional competition and the need to continue to expand product distribution and services offerings. Further information on potential factors that could affect the financial results of Siebel Systems are included in Siebel Systems' Annual Report on Form 10-K, Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q and its other filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, which are available at www.sec.gov. Siebel Systems assumes no obligation to update the information in this press release.Siebel is a trademark of Siebel Systems, Inc. and may be registered in certain jurisdictions. All other product and company names mentioned are the property of their respective owners and are mentioned for identification purposes only.