Siebel last week shipped an updated version of its customer relationship management (CRM) suite, Siebel 7.7, offering more functionality; a smoother, automated upgrade path; and better capabilities for retail banking.

Siebel 7.7 is designed to boost the productivity of staff by providing user-friendly improvements, including enhanced navigation capabilities such as a back-button; easier-to-read data; and embedded role-based guidance. The release also features integration with Microsoft Outlook as an embedded calendar in Siebel; and automatic updates for tasks and contacts, according to Ed Thompson, research vice-president of analyst Gartner.

"[The changes are] great because users do not have to flick backwards and forwards between applications, but email needs to be included," Thompson said.

The latest release also offers improvements for particular industries, ranging from telecoms to insurance; and a Customer Loyalty Management module to help companies running such programmes. The product also offers better tools for retail banking sector, with a Customer Relationship Console to provide customer-facing staff with more useful data to increase cross-selling opportunities.

The enhanced retail banking software is set to integrate with technology gained in Siebel's acquisition of Eontec last week - in a deal estimated to be worth $100m - to provide a scalable architecture that supports branches, call centres, internet banking and automated teller machines.

"In the next four to six years retail banks are set to renew their teller platforms and get onto a more open and more scalable J2EE [Java 2 Enterprise Edition] architecture," commented Kevin Nix, Siebel group vice-president of industry applications. "Most of the banks are still on OS2 platforms and want to move to Websphere and Linux."

In a keynote speech at a Siebel event held in Cannes last week, the firm's chief executive, Tom Siebel, said version 7.7 would be supported for the next decade and would focus on lowering costs.

Nix said Siebel 7.7 was easy to upgrade as firms already on the 7x platform could use the firm's automated upgrade technology - though upgrades from pre-7x platforms would be more complex.

Siebel also announced a strategic alliance with data warehouse specialist Teradata to increase the scalability of business intelligence tools through tighter integration between both firms' products.