Siebel Systems, Inc., a leading provider of customer-facing solutions, today announced the availability of Siebel CRM Professional Edition 7.8. The newest release of Siebel’s on premise offerings for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) delivers customer relationship management (CRM) capabilities specifically designed to support the unique business requirements of SMBs. This new release helps improve end user adoption through seamless integration with familiar desktop and Web applications. Siebel CRM Professional Edition 7.8 also provides cost-effective access to advanced call center functionality through integration with Siebel’s hosted contact center and delivers built-in best practices to increase sales, service, and marketing effectiveness.

“The release of Siebel CRM Professional Edition 7.8 underscores Siebel’s continued leadership in providing CRM solutions for small and medium-sized businesses,” said Mark Engebretson, Director of IT Applications at Plumtree Software. “It expands the frontiers of what is possible for an SMB-specific CRM solution to deliver and does so in a manner that is affordable and appropriate for our IT capabilities. We are particularly excited about the new Siebel integration to Microsoft Outlook as it will allow us to increase the speed with which our employees can access important customer data and improve the quality of their decisions and interactions with customers.”

Siebel CRM Professional Edition 7.8 is the latest release of Siebel Systems’ leading on premise CRM solution for SMBs. New features include:

– Siebel Connectors to Microsoft Exchange and Outlook — Siebel users are able to directly access and manage Siebel contacts, appointments, and tasks from Microsoft Outlook. Additionally, changes that are made to shared customer data in one application will be automatically synchronized with the other application. This high degree of integration increases the end user benefits of both Siebel and Outlook and ensures that employees have consistent information regardless of the system they use.

– Integration with Microsoft SharePoint — Siebel users can use Microsoft’s portal technology to develop personalized microsites that include key sales and service information from Siebel. These sites can be used to improve employee productivity through more effective project management and team collaboration.

– Integration with Siebel Contact OnDemand — Siebel CRM Professional Edition 7.8 integrates with Siebel Contact OnDemand, a hosted contact center that provides telephone infrastructure and automated call routing. Now SMBs can access industry-leading contact center functionality without deploying additional hardware or software.

– Leading Help Desk Capabilities — Siebel CRM Professional Edition delivers a full solution for managing and administering internal IT support that adheres to IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) standards.

“Siebel CRM Professional Edition 7.8 is designed for rapid end user adoption and can be deployed by SMBs that face budgetary and resource constraints,” said Rob Reid, Group Vice President, SMB, Siebel Systems. “However, we’ve also been able to provide the deeper functionality that midsized businesses need to address more sophisticated sales, service, and marketing challenges. With Siebel CRM Professional Edition 7.8 we’re combining the best that Siebel has to offer with other leading productivity tools such as Microsoft Outlook, Exchange, and SharePoint.”

Siebel CRM Professional Edition continues to gain momentum in the marketplace — growing by 178 percent annually and gaining industry awards and recognition. Most recently, Siebel Systems was awarded a Midsize Enterprise Innovation Award by attendees at this year’s Midsize Enterprise Summit, an event produced by Vision Events(R), a Gartner, Inc. (NYSE: IT and ITB) company. Siebel Systems also recently won CRM Magazine’s 2005 Market Leaders Award for the Midmarket Suite CRM category.

Siebel CRM Professional Edition 7.8 is available now. For additional information, please visit www.siebel.com/smb.

Source: BusinessWire