Founding Siebel Systems

Founding Siebel Systems

In an interview, Tom Siebel articulated two goals that had guided the company since its

inception--to build a high-technology company focused entirely on customer satisfaction, and to

build a company with enduring value. Siebel expanded on the initial business opportunity that he

identified in the early days:

We founded Siebel Systems to pursue a market opportunity that I had thought about for

many, many years--a market that had to happen, as sure as the sun was going to come up

tomorrow. At the time 400 vendors were competing in the emerging sales force automation

space, but none offered much beyond electronic contact management.

Given that customer satisfaction was fundamental to our vision, we went out and spoke to

potential customers to understand their needs before building our products. We talked to

Cisco, Sun, Clorox, Unisys, and Charles Schwab. We asked them if there was a way to apply

information technology to sales and marketing, just as it had been applied to the back office

and to the factory floor. If you could do it, what would it look like? We listened to them and

from that we wrote the first product spec. We took it back to them and said, is this what you

meant? They said no, and we revised. They got involved in the product design process from

the start.

By 2001 Siebel assessed that there had been a significant change in the way firms thought about

software decisions. Companies were shifting their focus from cost reduction to what software could

do for revenue, customer loyalty, customer retention, and even employee satisfaction. The Internet

was elevating e-business applications to the attention of a new level of decision maker, the chief

executive. Siebel elaborated:

Information technology used to be a CIO-level discussion, but not any longer. Today,

e-business is a CEO issue. Why? Because CEOs are realizing that they must use information

technology to manage their demand chain. They must be able to maintain a continuous

dialogue with their customers, regardless of how or when the interactions