AT&T strikes partnership with Siebel

On the heels of its strategic partnership with Cisco, AT&T today announced a similar alliance with CRM and e-business application vendor Siebel Systems. AT&T said it plans with Siebel to jointly sell end-to-end managed services, including hosting, business continuity and storage services.

Though neither company released any financial details of the alliance, the two said they would combine sales and marketing channels, targeting specific high-end customers with combined network access, transport and application bundles. AT&T said it has been working closely with Siebel in the months before the announcement, observing how its software performs over its network and exploring new ways to optimize it. One of the alliances first efforts will be to offer a “network optimization analyses” to Siebel’s eBusiness application customers, seeking the best way to model Siebel’s complex and powerful platform over the wide area network. In turn, AT&T hopes to leverage Siebel’s powerful product line into the sale of more managed services to those customers.

“This alliance is part of our effort to align ourselves with the best of the best,” said Jack Crowley, vice president of strategic partnerships and alliances for AT&T. “We’re committed to providing the best managed services platform and partnerships such as these help us cement that leadership role.”

AT&T announced its partnership with Cisco last month, agreeing to combine sales and marketing channels with the enterprise networking titan as well as deploy more Cisco equipment-based services over its network and jointly develop new managed services technology. Cisco and Siebel are only the first of strategic partnerships AT&T plans to announce, Crowley said. Over the next year expect AT&T to enter into several other technology and software alliances. Crowley said while there will be some overlap in various sectors, AT&T plans to strike deals with what are considered the industry leaders in each sector.

“The best is often going to be the biggest though,” Crowley said. “Just look at Cisco and Siebel.”

The Siebel partnership initially will be limited to the two companies U.S. operations, but AT&T said it plans to extend the services to multi-national customers and eventually internationally based customers in the future.