Redmond, Wash., and San Mateo, Calif., March 2, 2004 — Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ: MSFT) and Siebel Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ: SEBL) today announced that Siebel Business Integration Applications for the communications, media, and energy industries are now available for Microsoft® BizTalk®
Server 2004. Siebel Business Integration Applications are prebuilt, industry-specific integration processes; common objects; and transformations that are built upon the Universal Application Network (UAN) architecture and run on industry-leading integration servers. Siebel Systems and Microsoft are collaborating to provide UAN solutions that will deliver cost-effective, rapidly deployable business integration solutions across a broad range of industries. These solutions provide joint customers with the ability to automate their core business processes and make real-time, informed, customer-centric business decisions, substantially reducing the time, cost, and risk associated with application integration.
“Integration remains a CIO’s top priority,” said Nimish Mehta, Group Vice President, Universal Application Network at Siebel Systems. “Siebel Systems’ goal, and the goal of this joint offering, is to deploy end-to-end business processes that tie disparate systems, employees, and trading partners together seamlessly. Organizations must fundamentally do a better job of this if they want to remain competitive. Siebel Business Integration Applications running on Microsoft BizTalk Server can help companies achieve that goal.”
Typical approaches to integration often result in point solutions that do not fully account for the steps that users must take to complete a business process. As a result, cross-application business processes may be slow, opaque, inefficient, and error prone, yielding high operating costs and decreased customer satisfaction. For example, in the wireless communications industry a single customer’s call will cause the service agent to interact with a variety of systems, including acquiring customer profile information from the call center software, obtaining account balance information from the billing system, and acquiring service and repair history from the provisioning system.
Improper integration evidenced by manual process steps, poor coordination across different departments, employee confusion, and time delays inevitably yields a measurable, negative impact on cost-efficiency, customer satisfaction, and overall competitiveness in the marketplace.
With the availability of Siebel Business Integration Applications on Microsoft BizTalk Server 2004, joint customers in the communications, media, and energy industries can now take advantage of prebuilt integration applications that enable best-practice business processes for key functional areas including Customer Life Cycle Management, Billing Management, Customer Order Management, and Product Management.
In its third major release, BizTalk Server 2004 delivers new capabilities that enable enterprises to more effectively manage business processes and rules. It also improves their connections with trading partners and allows them to analyze the health of their business processes.
New functionalities in BizTalk Server 2004 include:
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Business Process Management (BPM), an orchestration engine with enterprise-class BPM capabilities;
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Health and Activity Tracking (HAT), which enables administrators to monitor and manage the health of the business processes;
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Enterprise Single Sign-On, which streamlines the sign-on verification process;
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Business Rules Engine, enabling users to create flexible and more responsive rules around business processes; and
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Business Activity Monitoring (BAM), which provides real-time monitoring of business processes for business analysts in familiar tools such as Microsoft Office Excel 2003 or Microsoft Office SharePoint (TM) Portal Server 2003.
“Siebel Business Integration Applications combined with BizTalk Server 2004 will enable customers to access their data and manage their processes in real time, reducing cost of ownership and time to deployment,” said Ted Kummert, Corporate Vice President of E-Business Servers at Microsoft. “We are excited about what these solutions will provide for customers today.”
Key benefits of the joint offering include:
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Integration with packaged or proprietary applications: Built on Web Services standards and the Microsoft .NET Framework, Universal Application Network running on Microsoft BizTalk Server 2004 enables companies to connect packaged and legacy applications, unlocking their value and exposing it throughout the enterprise.
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Reduced risk, total cost of ownership, and time to deployment: Custom development will be minimized by delivering prebuilt integration applications that reduce the cost and complexity of integration.
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Increased business flexibility and agility: Allows companies to leverage existing IT investments, deploy best-of-breed applications, and capitalize on existing IT competencies in Microsoft technologies and the .NET Framework
Siebel currently provides more than 120 business integration processes across a variety of industries as a part of its UAN offering. Microsoft and Siebel plan to continue expanding the availability for Siebel Business Integration Applications on the Microsoft BizTalk Server platform with releases of cross-industry Siebel Business Integration Applications, as well as additional industry-specific Siebel Business Integration Applications for the automotive, financial services, manufacturing, retail, insurance, healthcare, and public sector industries.
For the latest information on UAN and Microsoft BizTalk Server, please visit http://www.siebel-microsoft.com/ .
Developers and customers can find information about BizTalk Server 2004 at http://www.microsoft.com/biztalk/ . More information about members of the BizTalk Server Partner Program can be found at http://www.microsoft.com/biztalk/partners/default.asp .
About Universal Application Network
Developed by Siebel Systems in collaboration with leading technology companies, Universal Application Network (UAN) is a standards-based architecture for business integration. UAN includes packaged integration applications–Siebel Business Integration Applications–that run on industry-leading integration servers, eliminating the cost and complexity associated with traditional integration methods. With UAN, companies can leverage their existing IT investments, deploy best-in-class applications, and optimize their cross-application business processes, resulting in greater organizational agility and a lower total cost of ownership.
About Siebel Systems
Siebel Systems, Inc. is a leading provider of business applications software, enabling corporations to sell to, market to, and serve customers across multiple channels and lines of business. With more than 3,500 customer deployments worldwide, Siebel Systems provides organizations with a proven set of industry-specific best practices, CRM applications, market-leading analytics products, and business processes, empowering them to consistently deliver superior customer experiences and establish more profitable customer relationships. Siebel Systems’ sales and service facilities are located in more than 30 countries.
About Windows Server System
Microsoft Windows Server System (TM) is an integrated and interoperable server infrastructure that reduces IT complexity to enable IT professionals to deliver innovative solutions that meet the changing needs of business. With Windows Server (TM) 2003 at the foundation, Windows Server System is engineered from the ground up for XML Web Services based on Microsoft .NET technologies to connect information, people, systems and devices. Based on a common software architecture that spans all facets of IT from design, development and deployment through ongoing management and usage, Windows Server System provides comprehensive IT infrastructure for operations (security, systems management, networked storage), applications (data management and analysis, e-business) and information work (messaging, communications and collaboration). More information on Microsoft Windows Server System can be found at http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserversystem/ .
About Microsoft
Founded in 1975, Microsoft (NASDAQ “MSFT”) is the worldwide leader in software, services and Internet technologies for personal and business computing. The company offers a wide range of products and services designed to empower people through great software — any time, any place and on any device.
Except for the historical information contained herein, this press release contains forward-looking statements that involve risk or uncertainties. Future operating results of Siebel Systems may differ from the results discussed or forecasted in the forward-looking statements due to factors that include, but are not limited to, risks associated with customer relations, such as the availability of Siebel Systems’ products and services, customer implementation of products and services, relationships with customers, third-party vendors and systems integrators, concentration of revenues in a relatively small number of customers, existence of errors or defects in products, ability to successfully manage growth, significant current and expected additional competition and the need to continue to expand product distribution and services offerings. Further information on potential factors that could affect the financial results of Siebel Systems are included in Siebel Systems’ Annual Report on Form 10-K, Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q and its other filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, which are available at www.sec.gov . Siebel Systems assumes no obligation to update the information in this press release.Siebel is a trademark of Siebel Systems, Inc. and may be registered in certain jurisdictions.
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