Siebel Systems

» see siebel.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Thomas Siebel was an Oracle executive before he was anything else. He left in 1993 and started a company with Patricia House to sell sales force automation, which at the time meant giving a sales team one place to record who they had called and what had been promised. That grew into customer relationship management, and for most of a decade the category and the company were close enough to the same thing that people used the words interchangeably.

The growth was the kind that gets written up while it is still happening. Fortune named Siebel the fastest growing company in the United States in 1999. Revenue went past a billion dollars around 2000 and above two billion in the years after, and by 2002 the company held forty five percent of a market it had largely defined. Every large bank and telecom operator you can name was either running Siebel or being sold it.

Then the 2001 downturn arrived and hit telecommunications hardest, which happened to be where Siebel's largest customers were. Revenue fell back to $1.34 billion by 2004. The company still had five thousand employees in 2005 and a product nobody was ripping out, but the growth story was finished and the market had started pricing it as a mature software vendor rather than a future.

Oracle announced the acquisition on 12 September 2005 at $5.85 billion. Siebel shareholders voted on 31 January 2006, almost ninety nine percent of them in favor, and the merger closed the same day. Larry Ellison's line afterward was that Oracle was now the undisputed leader in customer relationship management software, which was true and also the point of buying the thing that had been beating him.

~ the dossier ~

~ the end of software ~

Marc Benioff was also an Oracle alumnus. He founded Salesforce in 1999 and aimed the entire brand at Siebel: a logo with the word software crossed out in a red circle, and hired actors picketing Siebel's own user conference. The argument underneath the theater was that a sales team did not need a six month implementation project and a server room, it needed a login. That argument was correct and it took about six years to become obviously correct.

Enterprise software is invisible unless you work somewhere that bought it. I was at university through the years Siebel peaked and fell, and CRM reached me the way it reaches most engineers, as a word in job listings attached to salary figures that looked wrong for something I had never seen. I have still never opened it.

~ what oracle was really buying ~

Oracle spent 2004 and 2005 assembling an applications business by purchase rather than by writing one. PeopleSoft went first and took JD Edwards with it. Siebel was the CRM piece of the same shopping list, and the $5.85 billion bought an installed base more than it bought code: thousands of large enterprises with deployments too deep to remove, each of them paying maintenance every year whether or not anyone was still developing the product.

Siebel had a little over five thousand employees at the end and the merger closed without a fight. Ninety nine percent of the shares voted yes.

~ it is still in production ~

The company is dead and the software is not. Oracle still ships Siebel CRM, still numbers releases, and still has customers on it twenty years after the merger closed. Somewhere right now a call center agent is looking at a screen whose layout was argued about in San Mateo in the 1990s.

This is the ordinary fate of enterprise software and it almost never gets written down. Consumer products die loudly, with a shutdown notice and a last day. A company like Siebel stops existing on a Tuesday in January, the logo comes off the building, and the thing it made carries on running in rooms nobody photographs.

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