Whats behind Siebels “CRM for everyone” strategy?
Schmaier: We have known for 10 years that CRM is the largest segment of application software. We knew if someone could build the state-of-the-art [CRM] software that this would be big. It is very clear today that CRM is not only bigger than ERP it’s probably one to two orders of magnitude bigger. InfoWorld: In your Siebel User Week keynote you spoke about Siebel’s metadata architecture. What’s your vision for that? Schmaier: [Back in] 1983 we started building an objected-oriented piece of application software. We [built what we] call configurable business objects. At run time, these objects respond based on property and attribute pairs in our metadata repository. And because it’s metadata-driven and declarative by nature, we also have a patented three-way application upgrader. So basically what we have is one metadata repository and we happen to store our metadata in a database. We have what we call Siebel Tools with this new customization environment, [and] when you hit [the upgrade b
