I have 5+ years of experience in Mainframe and J2EE. My company is willing to give me a break in CRM (Siebel or SAP). Do you think it'll be a good move to switch? If so which one is best(SAP/Siebel?
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Hannah Smalltree, Editorial Director
Both Siebel and SAP are viable areas to pursue a career in. Siebel has had a tougher go of it the last few years, due to the "double whammy" of CRM market pressures and the overall struggles of "best-of-breed" vendors to succeed in a marketplace dominated by enterprise-wide ERP vendors. But in the last six months, we've seen a bit of a comeback, both in the CRM space and with Siebel specifically. Despite how SAP might want to position itself, Siebel is still the market leader in terms of depth of CRM functionality. And lately, we've seen Siebel's stock price surge, perhaps on the strength of its new web-based initiatives. But, having said all that, I still like the SAP CRM option a little better, if all other factors are equal in your eyes. It just seems to me that most companies prefer doing business with a few main vendors. And SAP's big selling point is the ease of integration between the CRM and ERP components. In the end, how effective can CRM really be if it's not closely tied to back office order management and manufacturing systems? In a sense, if you go with Siebel, you might end up with a tight CRM focus, whereas the SAP CRM option is more likely to give you a view into how CRM connects to the rest of the enterprise, since that is how SAP is (successfully) presenting its CRM product. Both opportunities are intriguing, but it's hard not to go with the enterprise software market leader.
This was first published in February 2004