Customer-focused software booms

By ADAM GIFFORD

Murray Creighton's career path reads like a roll-call of some of the hottest names in the IT industry when they were hot - Wang, System Software Associates and PeopleSoft.

In every case he has moved on before the companies stumbled under the weight of constant technological change. Now he has turned up as Asia Pacific vice-president for front-office software specialist Siebel Systems.

Mr Creighton says his decision to move came after research into prospects for Siebel and the CRM (customer relationship management) market. The business was recently judged the fastest-growing company in the United States, and probably the world. Mr Creighton expects year-on-year revenue growth in this region to top 100 per cent. The 100 staff should double in number by the end of the year and reach 500 by the end of next year.

An office in New Zealand is likely soon to support partners, resellers and larger customers such as Mighty River Power and Southern Cross Healthcare. Siebel is sold here by JD Edwards and Great Plains.

The reason for the growth is that Siebel and its competitors in the CRM market offer a new way of using information in an organisation - one which can give impressive returns on investment.

Andrew Zoldan, Siebel's vice-president for dotcom applications, told the company's eBusiness World 2000 seminar in Sydney last week that for the past 30 years business had used information technology to make its internal processes more efficient.

"As my mother used to say, there's nothing wrong with a clean house," he told the audience of 1000. "Siebel's growth is not about making customers more efficient internally. We help customers to have more effective communications with customers."

Mr Zoldan said third-party research showed customers credited Siebel with a 15 per cent increase in revenue, a 21 per cent increase in customer satisfaction and a 20 per cent employee productivity gain in the first 10 months after implementation.

Since 1995, Siebel has bought shares in all its customers which are listed companies. The Siebel Index, as the portfolio is called, has significantly outperformed the Standard & Poor's Index.

"When a company turns its attention from being more efficient to improving communications with customers, and puts money behind that, it seems to do well," Mr Zoldan said.

Companies could not do without CRM. In the past decade undercapacity turned to overcapacity worldwide - for every commodity and most services there were more sellers than buyers.

"It's very expensive to lose a customer."

Mr Creighton said the ERP (enterprise resource planning) systems he devoted most of his career to had had their glory days.

ERP vendors probably got a couple of years of healthy sales because of the Y2K threat, but despite greater levels of efficiency, companies had not had the return they might have expected from such high-priced software.

While ERP systems were used by only a few people in an organisation, CRM reached almost everyone, meaning a far greater volume of licences to be sold.

* Siebel flew Adam Gifford to eBusiness World 2000.