Siebel SOA initiative bears fruit

Component Assembly product is designed to offer customers CRM "building blocks"

Siebel has launched the first line of products from its Project Nexus service-oriented architecture (SOA) initiative, designed to develop customer relationship management (CRM) components that can be slotted into companies’ SOAs.

Siebel said its Component Assembly product is designed to offer customers CRM “building blocks”, capable of running on both dot-Net and J2EE and which can fit into their SOA environments.

Kevin Nix, group vice-president at the CRM software vendor, said that the component approach lets IT departments build their own CRM capabilities more quickly, to help their firms gain a competitive edge.

Sheila Dunn of parcel delivery firm UPS welcomed this approach. “We don’t deploy one whole CRM suite but pick different modules that we want, so the ability to relatively easily build a suite to meet our needs is really interesting,” she said.

Also at the event, Oracle chief executive Larry Ellison hinted that his company would continue to support Nexus, despite reports last month that the database giant might not keep the Nexus project if its bid to buy Siebel succeeds.

Speaking in a video recorded for the 2,000 Siebel users and partners in Boston, Ellison said Siebel’s work with SOAs would “dovetail” with Oracle’s own SOA-enabled Project Fusion to integrate its various acquired applications.

Siebel chief executive George Shaheen said Ellison’s latest pronouncement proved that he had warmed to the initiative.

But Denis Pombriant of analyst company Beagle Research Group suggested that Project Nexus was the element on Siebel’s product roadmap most likely to be changed after the merger. “If I were Oracle I would look at the two projects, decide which was the furthest along and had the most potential, and stick with it,” he added.