Siebel partners with Teradata for analytics and acquires banking solutions company

Siebel Systems and Teradata, two companies whose business applications support nearly every industry segment, including communications, joined efforts this week in a strategic partnership to enhance business intelligence and data warehousing.

Through what the companies describe as a market-driven partnership, Teradata has joined Siebel’s Alliance Program and is now a strategic platform partner for Siebel. IDC has ranked Siebel the leader in analytic applications. The Teradata Warehouse will become a fully supported database for Siebel Analytic products.

"This partnership will deliver a new generation of active data warehousing and analytical application solutions with extensive user reach, large-scale detailed data, as well as analytical depth," said Bob Fair, vice president and chief marketing officer of Teradata. Teradata is a division of NCR Corporation.

Enhancements include a Teradata-specific request generation layer that sends optimized structured query language (SQL) data to the Teradata environment to exploit some of the unique analytical extensions to SQL.

Siebel's full suite of more than 150 analytic applications will be optimized for Teradata. The applications include sales, marketing, service, workforce, and partner and executive analytical capabilities for 20 different industries.

"Teradata is the leading enterprise data warehouse standard, and from our perspective, being recognized as a tier one supported platform for Siebel Analytics, further validates Teradata's leading position," Fair said.

The companies also are developing a data model integration methodology that will enable integration for joint customers who have purchased Teradata's industry specific logical data models and the Siebel Analytic applications.

"The benefit to customers is that it will allow them to integrate freely and extend and complement each company's data models for a more comprehensive view of information…minimize redundancy, as well as speed implementation for joint customers," said Larry Barbetta, group vice president and general manager for Siebel Analytics.

In just a couple of years, Siebel’s analytics applications have grown to represent over 20% of the company’s license revenue.

Siebel also acquired Eontec Limited, a global provider of multi-channel retail banking solutions. Siebel paid $70 million in cash for Eontec’s solutions, which will provide Siebel a standards-based architecture for handling a wide range of customer interactions through multiple channels, including the branch, call center, Internet, and ATM. Up to an additional $60 million in cash, with a target of $30 million, may be paid in earn-out payments.

The company also announced the release of Siebel 7.7, the latest version of its CRM application suite, which now tightly integrates with Microsoft .NET-enabled technologies.

The latest version features several new and enhanced capabilities. The sales automation feature includes sales goal planning, a salesperson metric dashboard and integrated sales training. There are also enhancements and new capabilities for the following applications: marketing, service and contact centers, field service, order management, partner relationship management, analytics, employee relationship management, handheld devices and mobile Web clients.