The new on demand service enables small and medium-sized organizations and divisions of larger businesses to organize, manage, and streamline their sales, marketing, and customer service activity through a hosted environment. It can be used as a stand-alone to run a business or integrated with on-site deployments of Siebel enterprise applications. This gives customers the choice of running their CRM system in a hosted environment, on-site, or in any combination of the two. The service will be fully available in the first quarter of 2004 and will be marketed, sold, hosted, and supported by BT. Customers will be able to access the service either as an integrated part of BTs existing Siebel-based Contact Central CRM portfolio, which extends the Siebel application to provide a full multimedia contact center solution, or as a stand-alone CRM application. Companies will be able to sign up for any number of licenses they need, all at a fixed price per user per month. Trial customers will be beta testing the BT-customized version of Siebel CRM OnDemand over the turn of the year. Together, BT and Siebel broaden the reach of Siebel CRM OnDemand, offering a hosted CRM solution to all UK organizations regardless of price sensitivity or deployment preference. Siebel CRM OnDemand, announced in October, and Siebels recent acquisition of online CRM provider UpShot, are part of an overall strategy to extend Siebels worldwide CRM leadership into the hosted market segment. BTs offering of Siebel CRM OnDemand is an extension of the already successful partnership between BT and Siebel Systems. This includes BT Contact Central, the first off-the-shelf customer contact center technology based on a combination of pure IP multimedia technology, Siebels CRM software, and BTs integration capability and service support. It also includes a program to deliver solutions for local governments, ranging from small district councils to large metropolitan authorities. BT Retail is a key customer of Siebel Systems with one of the largest and most ambitious CRM implementations ever, involving more than 22,500 users and creating a single view of more than 21 million consumer and business customers. Through this project, BT Retail anticipates cost savings of more than GBP120 million ($200 million) by 2004.
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