As Published In May 2007

Ed Abbo: Siebel

After beginning his career at Oracle, Ed Abbo joined Siebel to become a part of the development team creating Siebel's world-class customer relationship management (CRM) software. Now back at Oracle, Abbo has assumed leadership for Applications Unlimited. After the announcement of upgrades to all five of Oracle's application lines, Profit spoke with Abbo about the new release of Oracle's Siebel software and customer reactions to Applications Unlimited.

Currently: Senior vice president, Oracle Applications Development Prior to Oracle: Siebel Systems Education: Bachelor's degree in mechanical and aerospace engineering from Princeton University; master's degree in computer control systems from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

PROFIT: The latest release of Siebel Customer Relationship Management is described as transformational CRM. What does that mean?

ABBO: According to the Economist's business intelligence survey of CEOs, companies are trying to grow their businesses. For the first time in many years, growth is a higher priority than cost reduction. That's the backdrop to transformational CRM. The key to growth is pretty easy. Sell more products to existing customers and then acquire additional customers. In order to grow, you have to make your customers a lot more satisfied with your product so they buy more products from you and recommend your products to others. So transformational CRM is really about transforming your company from being very product oriented in terms of going to market, to becoming customer centric. It's about putting the customers' needs at the focal point, and then reorienting your entire company to satisfy those particular needs.

PROFIT: What new Siebel features support that goal?

ABBO: There are several exciting new capabilities that we've built into the product so that companies can deliver a superior customer experience. One of the most significant is enabling the systems to support every customer interaction so that employees can have intelligent conversations with customers. To support this, we've embedded real-time decisioning capabilities. For example, if I'm a banking customer, I walk into a branch, I deposit some money, and then I leave. That's the traditional experience. In the superior customer experience, as you're depositing that money, the system automatically informs the agent about your overall financial picture and makes a recommendation about what you should do with that money. That transforms the conversation and makes it a lot more intelligent than simply servicing the request of the customer. Embedding real-time decisioning analytics is one of the key capabilities in Siebel 8. Another great new capability is the task-based user interface. Essentially, what it does is create a directed work process for users. This helps the employee or the customer interact with the system through a guided work process. And in a similar fashion, if the agent is processing the deposit or opening an account, the system will step through the minimum amount of information needed to do that.

From an IT perspective, there are two categories of benefits around Siebel 8. The first is service-enabling the platform. The benefit of doing that is to allow the information technology group to more easily integrate the Siebel CRM product with the infrastructure that they have—or new applications and technologies that they want to introduce into their environment. The second is around performance scalability. We have already proved that Siebel can scale to tens of thousands of users, but Siebel 8 sets new benchmarks that improve performance for the largest enterprises in the world.

PROFIT: The service-enabling piece, was that done to enable the software to work better with Oracle Fusion Middleware?

ABBO: Good question. The other thing we've done with the Siebel products in general, starting with 7.8 and extending it in 8, is certifying Siebel with Oracle Fusion Middleware. Siebel supports Oracle Database; that's a fundamental level. But at a level above that, you can now start to use Oracle's enterprise management tools to manage Siebel as part of your environment.

I Love My Job Ed Abbo One of the most fulfilling things is to go out and interact with customers and really understand the front-office requirements across industries. Then coming back and engaging a team in defining a product, delivering the product in the marketplace, and seeing the results, which started as an interaction with the customer. It's a very fulfilling cycle, from idea, to delivery, to seeing the business change as a result of delivering that product in production.

PROFIT: How does this set us apart from other CRM vendors?

ABBO: One difference is the industry breadth and depth that Siebel brings to the marketplace. In Siebel 8, we've continued to invest in our industry functionality, including integrating Siebel with Oracle back-office assets, and these are industry specific. So, for example, we integrated Siebel with the core banking systems from i-flex. In the communications industry, we're integrating Siebel front office with the portal billing and then activation and provisioning systems. We're delivering more value to each of the industry customers by providing an end-to-end process support in the application. The other area is the flexibility of deployment options for the CRM products. You hear two philosophies in the market. One is taking the CRM system and implementing it as an on-premise deployment at a company location. The other is to have it hosted by a provider, in an on-demand or software-as-a-service basis. We are providing ultimate flexibility for our customers, because they can choose CRM as an on-demand offering or choose it as an on-premise offering. And many of our customers are starting to mix and match, using the software in a hybrid manner, meaning that some divisions or geographies within a company get started on demand—maybe for remote locations or smaller offices—while other parts of the company have an on-premise implementation. But all users can still share information as they would in a single-premise deployment. Oracle is unique in offering that flexibility.

PROFIT: Where do you see innovation in CRM heading?

ABBO: I believe that in order for companies to move forward, they must mandate a superior customer experience. We are doing this at Oracle by committing to a superior ownership experience, which will ensure that everything we do—from building products to delivering services—will improve our customers' overall experience with Oracle. The approach that businesses need to follow is twofold. The first requirement is the application of information technology to the problem, which essentially is CRM. The second is business transformation. And one without the other won't cut it. The business transformation aspect is about motivating employees to prioritize customer needs over selling individual products in a relatively haphazard fashion. The information technology is one half; the business transformation is the second half of the equation. With the application of real-time decisioning, we're providing customers with the software they need to transform these systems from passive systems, where data is entered, to active and proactive systems that assist the application user—whether that is an employee or a customer—to provide meaningful product recommendations much as you would through, say, Amazon.com, where if you express interest in one book, they'll recommend other books that other customers have been interested in. And the result of that, in addition to all the other things that I've talked about, will result in a superior customer experience that will drive customer loyalty and revenue growth.