Thomas Siebel has an amazing success story which has come full circle to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Siebel received degrees from Illinois starting in 1975 with B. A. in History, an M. B. A. in 1983 and in 1985, and a M. S. in Computer Science.
From there Siebel took a position with Oracle, one of the world’s largest software companies until 1990 when he moved to Gain Technology, a multimedia software company which was ultimately acquired.
In 1993 he created Siebel Systems. The growth of Siebel Systems is unparalleled even compared to Microsoft. Siebel hit the billion dollar mark in revenue faster than anyone – just seven years from scratch. By focusing on the fast-growing market of Customer Relationship Management, Siebel has made inroads with larger and mid-size companies all over the world.
Due to the success of Siebel Systems, Thomas Siebel has accumulated wealth in the range of 3 billion dollars.
He was generous enough to share some of that with the University of Illinois in the form of a $32 million dollar gift to create the Thomas M. Siebel Center for Computer Science. This building will allow the U of I to attract more of the world’s brightest computer scientists to their faculty and it will also house further research into embedded systems technology.
It seems that Siebel’s success just keeps growing with each endeavor he pursues. Maybe he should make the short list for the vacant Fighting Illini football head coaching position. |
