Siebel re-shaping plans laid bare
Published: 11 Oct 2004 12:10 BST
I couldn't help but notice that on the slides, you used in your keynote that OnDemand was in a smaller bubble than the bubbles representing business units, including traditionally packaged software and custom-developed software. Are there some situations where subscription software doesn't make sense?
It doesn't make sense wherever a customer wants to maintain and control their own infrastructure. There are countries that don't want data about customers to go beyond a country's borders. There's a whole host of reasons why some customers don't want to do that.
There are cultural differences. In Japan, there's a great emphasis on building your own software. That's considered a strategic imperative in those cultures. So you don't go into those cultures and say, "Well, that's interesting, but here's what I think you should do."
Right now, software as a service is a small portion of the overall market. The custom market is by far the biggest market. Siebel has traditionally been positioned in packaged applications, and we're going to broaden and go out and participate in the entire market.
Do you see your job here as leading a turnaround, and have you ever done one before?
I've spent most of my career doing turnarounds at IBM. That's what I've done and, yes, that's exactly what I signed up to do here.
Will this be the most challenging turnaround you've ever been tasked with?
I think the scope of this is significant. From a scale standpoint, it's smaller. But the scope of it is bigger, because it involves all the things we just talked about. Almost every aspect of how you go about transforming an institution needs to be addressed at Siebel Systems.
It's not just one little thing or tweak. It really is all aspects of it. That's what I found challenging. I knew this before I got here. It was no surprise. That's what attracted me to this opportunity -- the ability to reshape Siebel Systems and to capitalise on what I think is a pretty significant market opportunity.
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