A History of Silicon Valley

This biography is an appendix to my book "A History of Silicon Valley"


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(Copyright © 2009 Piero Scaruffi)

Thomas Siebel

Thomas Siebel (Illinois, 1952) grew up in Chicago and studied engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign until 1983. In 1984 Siebel joined Oracle, where he became a sales executive. In 1990 he moved to a multimedia start-up, Cayenne Systems, later renamed Gain Technology and sold to Sybase in 1992. In 1993 he and Patricia House started Siebel to market a software application for sales force automation, the first step towards Customer Relationship Management (CRM). It was an evolution of a project implemented at Oracle and called OASIS (Oracle Automated Sales Information System). Siebel's IPO made Siebel a billionaire on paper. He also founded the Siebel Foundation (1996) to fight homelessness and drug addiction. In 1999 Siebel owned almost 50% of the CRM market. Oracle acquired Siebel in 2005 for $5.8 billion. Siebel campaigned for a right-wing candidate in the 2008 elections.
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