"Siebel meets Google"

Siebel launched its hosted CRM service in Europe and announced version 7.7 of its CRM application suite at the Siebel User Week conference in Cannes, France, on Wednesday

CRM OnDemand, which was launched in the US late last year, allows companies to provide a CRM application to key employees for a standard monthly fee, removing the need to deploy any additional hardware or software because the service is hosted through Siebel and can be accessed over the internet.

In a packed auditorium, Siebel's chief executive Tom Siebel told the 1,800 attendees that the new service provides a powerful CRM application from a simple browser interface: "Small and medium organisations - and divisions of larger organisations - are choosing the hosted model to avoid upfront capital expenditure and to reduce in-house IT requirements."

"This is Siebel meets Google," he said.

Additionally, Siebel explained that OnDemand is more than a standalone CRM solution because it can also be integrated with the company's traditional CRM application. "We are in the business of delivering customer-facing applications for any organisation and any user," he said.

Earlier this year, Forrester Research predicted the market for CRM software will top $3.5bn (£1.9bn) in licence revenue by 2006, with hosted CRM services expected to account for 15 percent of the total. Siebel is hoping its OnDemand offering will help the company fight off competition from rivals such as Salesforce.com, which is preparing a £50m IPO later this year and is pursuing a target of one million subscribers by 2007.

Munir Kotadia writes for ZDNet UK