Siebel was, and still is, the market share leader in CRM software. Does anyone know what that means anymore? One basic definition from the business press to explain what Siebel makes: software "used by businesses to automate sales and customers service operations." That pretty much covers every technological tool used in call centers.

Before anyone emails back to tell me I'm oversimplifying, let me say right now that I know perfectly well what CRM was and is supposed to do. And I also know that it's a form of middleware that call centers adopted en masse in the late 90s because of the peculiar circumstances of their industry - agents had sub-par access to customer info databases at precisely the moment when the needed the info most. In pursuit of lower call times and better productivity, the CRM vendors threw integrations together and called it a revolution.

Siebel itself is worth a tenth of what it was five years ago.

Does the need still exist for that kind of integration? Sort of. Yes, the data needs to flow into the call center so it's at the agent's fingertips. But companies are not willing to upend their entire software infrastructure to make it happen. Companies are increasingly asking hard questions about who is going to own and manage the flow of that data - is it going to originate with IT? Is it going to be tied into the core business applications used by the rest of the company? Can I rent the software instead of buying it? Does it create yet another layer software that's prone to integration headaches? Does it limit, rather than enhance, my flexibility?

By my count this is the third time Oracle has a call center company with the intent of providing combined CRM and business apps. First was NPRI in (I think) 1997; that was a small fry purchase allowing Oracle to dip their toe in the water and begin to understand things from the call center point of view. Second, Peoplesoft last year.

Now, by buying Siebel, they force us to recognize two truths. 1) That CRM properly belongs in the hands of the people and programs that are data-centric: the database and business intelligence sectors. It has nothing to do with call handling or call control. And 2), this puts the exclamation point, or at least a period, on the eight year experience that was the CRM revolution. It's over. CRM is a category that doesn't mean anything anymore.