As a bit of historical reference to complement Baseline Consulting partner and cofounder Jill Dyché’s guest-blogpost yesterday, we thought it might be useful to dig up an old Q+A with Siebel Systems founder Tom Siebel, conducted by our forebears here at CRM, way back in 2002.

It’s also worth remembering the days before cloud computing, software-as-a-service, and on-demand CRM — and the fact that they relied on now-disposed-of terms such as hosting, ASP (application service provider), and “the integrated enterprise.”

The more things change, the more they stay the same…

One key excerpt:

CRM: Do you believe the hosting model for CRM like the one promoted by Salesforce.com is a threat to vendors like Siebel?

Siebel: They’re not in my consideration as a competitor. I believe I have never encountered them competitively in nine years. And I am absolutely satisfied that they do not have a viable business model.

[More after the jump....]

Some additional excerpts:

The World According to Tom

Why he is not the king of the customer. Why SAP and Oracle are lying. And why the ASP model won’t work.

The man who practically started the CRM industry back in 1993 believes his company is delivering what customers really want in a CRM application, and balks at those who say offering an integrated CRM/ERP enterprise solution is the only way to be successful selling CRM in the future. And if you really want to get his ire up, just mention Salesforce.com and its boastful claims of customer wins from Siebel defections.

CRM: Do you consider yourself the founder of the CRM industry as we know it today?

Siebel: I believe that it is a true statement that before we started this business the CRM industry was nascent. There wasn’t much going on. I believe we have provided some leadership in the CRM industry. I think we had something to do with the direction of the industry.

CRM: Siebel is still the number-one market leader…. Who do you consider to be your biggest competitors?

Siebel: …We’re really not focused on competitors. We are focused on [the fact that] I don’t need to be the largest software company in the world, I don’t need to be the largest enterprise application software company in the world. We are just focused on building great products and focused on making our customers happy. And however big we are is however big we are. But I understand that strategy has worked out pretty well, and I think in virtually every aspect of CRM and in every segment of the industry we have a main market position.

…>snip<…

CRM: Do you believe the hosting model for CRM like the one promoted by Salesforce.com is a threat to vendors like Siebel?

Siebel: They’re not in my consideration as a competitor. I believe I have never encountered them competitively in nine years. And I am absolutely satisfied that they do not have a viable business model.

CRM: Why is that?

Siebel: Virtually every company that has based its business model on [the ASP idea of remote applications] has gone out of business. Corio, US Internetworking…some of these companies lost billions of dollars in market valuation. Virtually every one of these companies has closed their doors.

We were actually a leader in offering our product through that form factor, where you can buy [by] the month, and the productization of it was called SiebelNet. You pay per user, per month. You didn’t have to buy any software. You didn’t install any software. And you could do it through the outsourcer of your choice. We had arrangements with AT&T. We had arrangements with US Internetworking. We had arrangements with Corio. And we allowed customers to buy applications in that form factor if they so desired it. But the fact of the matter is, it is not the way they wanted to do it. When you get into their data about their customers, their revenue forecasts, their customer support data, their customer success information, I believe [companies] are pretty darn reticent to entrust that information to a third party.

There is not one example of this outsourcing application business model being successful. I just don’t think it is a viable business model.

The full published text of the interview, conducted by Elliot Markowitz, can be found here.

Oh, and a tip of the hat to Mark Priscaro, who twittered the following on May 3rd, reminding us of its existence:

@MarkPriscaro: Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff must laugh uncontrollably ever time he reads this: http://tinyurl.com/c4fsvt (CRM mag cover story, 10/02).

j.