Siebel last week launched its new business intelligence analytics suite claiming the opportunities for this type of software in Australia far outstrips interest in CRM applications.

The new suite promises to provide customers with pre-built solutions to gain new levels of actionable intelligence across virtually all business functions including sales, service, marketing, finance, procurement, human resources, operations and supply chain and executive management. Organized into four main application areas - customer analytics, financial analytics, workforce and employee performance management, and supply chain and supplier analytics - the applications can be deployed independently, but also have built-in capabilities to provide cross-enterprise insight and integration from a variety of operational applications and data sources including SAP, Oracle Applications, PeopleSoft and Siebel.

Siebel Systems vice president of analytics, Paul Rodwick, who was in Australia last week, said Siebel Business Analytics has been built from the ground up.

"It's a pre-built, pre-integrated solution and it promises to offer valuable insight into an organization in just 90 days," he said.

More than 400 organizations have committed to the solution worldwide including DaimlerChrysler, Ford Motor Company and Reuters, as well as Westpac locally.

"The BI market is three to four times larger than the CRM market here, so I do expect there will be quite a lot of interest in Australia," Rodwick said.

According to Siebel, more than 75 per cent of existing customers use the Siebel Business Analytics products to provide insight from data sources beyond CRM, so Rodwick claims the newly developed enterprise analytic applications represent a natural extension to the company's product portfolio.

The product incorporates key metrics, workflows and business processes reflecting analytical best practices for each business topic area, and are tailored to the needs and data sources specific to each industry.

It includes personalized, intuitive dashboards, pre-built data extraction, transformation and loading (ETL) routines, ETL and data integration technology from Informatica, and built-in domain specific best-practice metrics, key performance indicators and business analysis processes.

IDC predicts that the customer analytic applications market will be worth over $US1.5 billion by 2008, and is the fastest growing segment in the overall business analytics market.

"Analytic applications are becoming increasingly critical as organizations strive to leverage business intelligence technology for increasing efficiency and for maximizing business opportunity," according to IDC group vice president for applications and information access Henry Morris.