Lessons from the Death of a Tech Goliath

By Bruce Cleveland

via www.brucedaley.com

Couple points to add:

1. Siebel maintenance spend is actually growing not decreasing. Siebel customers spent $1B on maintenance in 2013, up from about $600M in 2011.

2. Saleforce may dominate the edge of the network(marketing), but especially in Telecom, Siebel still owns the core (alongside Amdocs, Oracle, SAP, etc)

3. With my portfolio company Buzzient, we've seen  a few behaviors recently:

• Users giving up on Salesforce for departments other than Sales and Marketing
• Users choosing Oracle CRM On Demand (i.e Siebel On Demand) in NEW deployments, over Salesforce and Microsoft
• Users refusing to upgrade Siebel to Version 8.2, where Oracle provides Social CRM support. In fact, we've learned that many of the largest Siebel customers are not even v8.1, and many are v7.x

We all have a lot to learn from Bruce's recollections of this moment in time, but it's also valuable to step away from they hype and see what's really going on with customers still using Siebel, potentially alongside Salesforce.