IBM AND SIEBEL Systems further cemented their relationship Monday, inking a deal that facilitates business process integration
across Siebel's CRM software and other applications in the enterprise.
The partnership grows out of Siebel's UAN (Universal Application Network) initiative, launched in April as a way to ease
integration headaches and high costs associated with its CRM software, according to company officials. UAN hinges on using
standards to create prebuilt business processes, common object models, and data transformation maps that marry Siebel CRM
with back-office systems.
Templates will address a process such as "place customer order" that originates in a Siebel call center app, but needs to
flow back into an enterprise's logistics, supply chain, and billing systems to execute successfully.
"From an end-user perspective, they don't want to see application investments made in specific areas being disconnected
from related parts of their business," said Paraic Sweeney, vice president of marketing for WebSphere Business Integration,
in Somers, N.Y. "They want a mechanism for a business process that drives across multiple applications."
Central to the deal, the first major version release of Siebel UAN will operate on the IBM WebSphere Business Integration
platform. In addition, Siebel will license IBM's stable of 70 to 100 prebuilt business process templates and object models,
many of which came to IBM via its acquisition of CrossWorlds Software in January. For its part, IBM plans to concurrently
sell WebSphere Business Integration server as the infrastructure platform needed to execute the process integration, according
to Sweeney.
The two companies are also offering a customized migration path for Siebel customers who want to move away from their existing
point-to-point application integration architecture to the UAN approach, Sweeney said.
Lastly, Siebel announced that it will be using IBM's WebSphere Business Integration platform internally to tie together
its applications, according to officials.
IBM is not alone in working on Siebel's UAN. The CRM giant tapped an array of integration vendors such as Tibco, Vitria,
SeeBeyond, and webMethods; each is developing its own set of business processes and process design tools aimed at the problem.
Siebel also enlisted partners in the systems integrator community, including Accenture, KPMG, and IBM Global Services, to
drive the implementation phase of UAN rollouts.
However, the tight ties with IBM could translate into a difficult balancing act for Siebel with regard to the other middleware
vendors, according to some analysts.
"That's the challenge of trying to be Switzerland," said Michele Rosen, industry analyst at Framingham, Mass.-based IDC.
In particular, Rosen questioned how the licensing of IBM's common object models to define and map data such as "customer"
across Siebel and other applications is going to impact how the other EAI vendors' object models work with Siebel.
"If you're going to base your objects on those from IBM, then that implies that there is a tighter connection with IBM than
the others," Rosen said.
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