CRM vendor Siebel Systems Inc. is offering a new set of industry-specific process enhancements built around Microsoft Corp.’s next-generation BizTalk Server 2004 integration platform.
As part of its Universal Application Network (UAN) business process and system technology initiative, San Mateo, Calif.-based Siebel Tuesday announced plans to roll out new workflows for its customers. Siebel has been shipping its UAN technology for the past year as a way to use prebuilt connectors and objects to link to back-end and other systems and create integrated processes out of the box.
The company now has 51 UAN customers, said Nimish Mehta, group vice-president of UAN at Siebel. There are 35 new processes in all, in addition to 120 workflows that already exist.
With the latest release of BizTalk 2004, Siebel intends to extend its integration technology to the energy, communications and media sectors, said Mehta. For instance, there will be an offering specifically for wireless carriers that will let call center employees see all relevant billing or credit data about a given customer without having to access multiple screens or systems. Typically, expensive custom work is needed to achieve that level of integration, but it now comes as part of the Siebel software offering, he said.
Siebel will also offer support for customer life-cycle management for media companies, which will ensure that all disparate records on a given customer are synchronized for accuracy.
The UAN software will be available with Microsoft’s release of BizTalk Server 2004.
Siebel’s UAN initiative is critical for its success, said Sheryl Kingstone, an analyst at The Yankee Group consultancy, as CRM integration is a priority for the majority of companies this year.