More than a year after it first revealed its "separate but equal" integration partnerships with Microsoft and IBM, Siebel says progress has been made in both endeavors

For Microsoft environments, Siebel Business Integration applications are now available for the communications, media and energy industries for Microsoft BizTalk Server 2004. Siebel also has outlined progress in its joint effort with IBM to improve automation of business processes for application management. These announcements suggest that unlike many tech partnerships, the alliances Siebel struck over a year ago with the two tech giants are more than paper relationships. "They show that Siebel, Microsoft and IBM are moving closer to their goal of seamless integration," Denis Pombriant, managing principal of the Beagle Research Group, told CRM Daily. IBM is announcing the launch of its Orchestration and Provisioning Automation Library (OPAL), Skip Bacon, Siebel's general manager, technology, told CRM Daily. OPAL is an ecosystem, of sorts, to aid business partners in sharing I.T. best practices and workflows for storage, network infrastructure, server platforms, applications and middleware, as well as workflows for such specific industries as banking and finance, retail, healthcare and government. OPAL also includes an online automation catalog that serves as a collaborative network, so business partners and customers can share information on workflows that have been reviewed and validated by IBM. The joint announcement with Microsoft illustrates Siebel's ongoing efforts to improve integration in another way -- by rolling out industry-specific (in this case, media, communications and energy) business-integration applications that allow joint customers to automate their business processes.