Siebel Unified Messaging Framework - Part 1
Transcription
Siebel Unified Messaging Framework - Part 1
The Death Match That Never Happened – Siebel vs. Salesforce As a follower of news and articles revolving the Siebel world, you might have stumbled upon the Fortune article titled “Siebel v Salesforce — Lessons from the Death of a Tech Goliath” written by former Siebel Systems executive Bruce Cleveland. Despite the somewhat misleading title which suggests that Siebel is dead (which it is clearly not), I enjoyed reading the article and following the discussion it spawned. In the article, Bruce confronts the “nice tale” that David Salesforce defeated Goliath Siebel in the first decade of this century. Bruce argues, and I go 100% with him, that Siebel Systems was definitely on its knees between 2001 and 2004 due to a global recession but it didn’t share the same market segment with the new player in the CRM SaaS market, Salesforce.com. Image source: Wikipedia I joined Siebel Systems in 2001 and witnessed how its upper management tried to avoid the unavoidable. Imagine, you have to go full stop from being the fastest growing company in history to actually laying off 40% of your workforce, giving in to the weak economy. As we all know, Siebel Systems survived, albeit bruised and emerged from the recession with a renewed portfolio including Sales Service Call Center Customer Self Service Partner Relationship Management Marketing (now integrated with Siebel Analytics, the tobe Oracle BI flagship) Loyalty Product, Pricing and Order Management Master Data Management The above is an incomplete list but still constitutes a suite of functionality available in more than 20 industry specific flavors that most vendors can just dream of today. I believe it was the wisest decision of the Siebel management to keep investing in development during the recession. “Hit the road running” was a phrase often heard in those days. With a portfolio like the above, seeing Siebel only as CRM or Call Center software would have been a mistake in 2005, and it is even more so today. With good reasoning, Mr. Cleveland lays out why Salesforce flourished while Siebel’s sales slumped. Primarily because Salesforce was picking up customers in the SMB market, a market which Siebel tried to reach with its MidMarket offering but failed because even the stripped-down product was too complex for SMBs. Siebel CRM is in its for the needs of the Siebel was into the cool, with sales.com successful Siebel CRM very DNA an on-premise product, designed biggest of the big global corporations. cloud (or SaaS) business before it was and some years later with the much more OnDemand. CRM OnDemand continues to be hosted by Oracle and I would rather compare Salesforce’s success in the SaaS market to how Oracle does with CRM OnDemand and its recent Sales Cloud product (based on Fusion Applications). Comparing Siebel CRM on-premise to a cloud product is too much an “oranges vs. apples” situation and if you are serious about your expertise in the CRM market, you should know better. The focus of Bruce’s article is on what companies can learn from Siebel’s struggle and Salesforce’s success, which makes it even better from an educational standpoint. If you want to join the discussion, please also read Bruce’s follow-up article on his own blog as well as Dave Kellogg’s analysis. Bruce has taken the time to comment on Dave’s post and shares some more executive insight into the history of Siebel and why some decisions were made. Fellow Siebelite Richard has also published his take on the Siebel vs. Salesforce story. If you want a blast from the past, an interview with Bruce Cleveland from Nov 2005, shortly after Oracle announced to acquire Siebel Systems is found here. Summary While many people still are under the impression that Siebel CRM is dead, my personal experience and contact with students, consultants and customers confirms otherwise. With an unmatched array of functionality and Open UI, Siebel is well equipped to stay. In the future we might see attempts to move Siebel to the cloud but in its DNA it is an on-premise product, and a good one to that. So please stop comparing it to cloud based software. have a nice day @lex Siebel Themed Crossword In the spirit of weekend relaxation (and probably motivated by the 20th Anniversary of Siebel last year), we are pleased to present to you the Siebel-themed crossword. It’s not easy, but it should be fun. You can access the online version (ODE – Siebel Crossword) or the paper version to print and play at home. (ODE – Siebel Crossword Paper Version). There are some easy clues, and some not so easy. Enjoy! No prizes, just fun. If you have solved all the answers, let us know on @twitter. Use the hashtag #seblcrw and tell us how fast you did it, or what clue you are stuck on! And if you really get stuck there is a cheat feature. Feel free to share the official short urls : ODE – Siebel Crossword Online = http://od-ed.com/w2AQk ODE – Siebel Crossword Paper Version = http://od-ed.com/Mf72J Voiceovers These days I spend a fair amount of time doing voiceovers for videos. It is really rather fun (since I love language, everything and anything about voice, speech, accent, and intonation).I have also been researching how the famous voices make it work. So sometimes, I listen to the following audio. For some light relief – this is how a voice-over artist REALLY makes his presence felt. Please be aware there is some swearing in this audio. The word shoals (as in shoals of fish) gives me goosebumps every time. Listen. While you are at it, have a good laugh with the other audio about soap :). Changes in Oracle's Patching Strategy for Siebel CRM If you are following the various articles on Siebel Open UI on My Oracle Support (hopefully using the great Open UI Information Center available as Document 1511846.2), you might have stumbled upon Oracle Support Document 1535281.1 (Latest recommended maintenance pack for Siebel Open UI on Siebel Version 8.1.1.x and Version 8.2.2.x) which holds some interesting information regarding Oracle’s strategy for releasing quick fixes, maintenance releases or patches for future Siebel versions. The biggest news is that from Innovation Pack 2013 (i.e. version 8.1.1.11 and 8.2.2.4) onwards, Oracle will provide monthly patchsets which introduce a fifth digit in the version number. Source: My Oracle Support So the January patchset for 8.1.1.11 is 8.1.1.11.3, as you can see in the above screenshot. The patches can be downloaded as usual from My Oracle Support. Bringing the new monthly patchset strategy together with the traditional version paths results in the following diagram: Example version path from Siebel 8.0 to 8.1.1.11.3 Explanation: When a Siebel customer goes from an older major release such as 8.0 to a newer one such as 8.1.1, a full upgrade is required. Besides physical schema changes, the full upgrade always includes the notorious repository merge and subsequent conflict resolution and post-merge fixup which is usually measured in person months or even years (for larger projects). Once the newer release is reached, customers can apply patches or quick fixes without the need to merge repositories. Since 8.1.1.10, Oracle delivers innovation packs (one per year), the current being IP 2013. To reach an innovation pack level, customers must not only apply the patch but also run the Incremental Repository Merge (IRM) which is (as of 8.1.1.11) basically the same as a full upgrade, albeit a bit more automated. Still there might be conflicts to resolved and things could break and require fixing. If you are already on 8.1.1.11 (or 8.2.2.4), you can obtain the monthly patchsets which are just that, a patch. So there is no repository merge to do. Monthly patchsets replace planned 8.1.1.12 / 8.2.2.5 fix pack As announced in MOS document 1600520.1, “The new Patchset process will make redundant the planned release of Siebel CRM version 8.1.1.12 / 8.2.2.5 Fix Pack (FP) in early 2014.” But, so the same announcement assures us, IP 2014 is still going ahead. have a nice day @lex Jargon Busting The world we work in loves jargon. Let’s terms we work with (CRM, SRF, SEM) are outside world in the wide sense. Worse love mean various things to different busting surprises: face it, many of the impenetrable to the still, the terms we people. Some jargon Crew Resource Management in aviation Solid Recovered Fuels in waste and energy management Standard Error of the Mean in statistics Any time new students and be an interesting jargon room. Policy Automation is and Backward Chaining, (ha!), they all get us in new jargon meet, there is bound to busting challenge in the training a great example. Inference, Forward Determination, Natural Language a bit of a spin. So we decided to begin a “jargon buster” micro-lecture series for Policy Automation. If you go to the ODE Online Library and scroll down the page to the bottom of the list of training modules, you will see “OPA – Jargon Buster”. There are only three modules right now, but there are three more in the process of being written. We are travelling a lot right now so it is a little bit of a challenge and hope you will understand. But we will update this blog when the others come out. It is free and we hope you can learn from it, and be inspired to extend your CRM reach by investigating this wonderful tool. Infographic: APM for CRM Germain Software has just released a new infographic titled “APM for CRM”. It shows the state of APM for CRM applications, it features visual content from a Fall 2013 survey of the IT professionals who listed Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and/or e-commerce and Order Management as their top priorities (#1 or #2) for APM. The key to Application Performance Management for CRM? Performance. The top three priorities for APM are increasing performance for end users, reducing risks linked to poor application performance, and measuring and analyzing performance. All roads lead back to performance! Closely related to performance, the top challenge for Order Management and e-commerce applications is availability. Twenty nine percent of IT professionals agreed that availability ranks above end user experience and integrations as the biggest challenge. Because CRM applications are complex applications that are tightly integrated into other systems, it is not surprising that 59% of IT experts experience some kind of performance problem at least once a week. See the “APM for CRM” infographic for more interesting facts and figures. Infographic authored by Germain Software LLC. To view the original post: APM for CRM Infographic. Microlectures Microlectures, as defined by the somewhat reliable Wikipedia, are ~60 second video and audio instructional modules, designed in a specific way, for online and mobile learning. Compare that to our eLearning library, where each Course Lesson typically is estimated at 5 minutes, not counting the practical assignments that are an integral part of the content. (which can take longer of course). This kind of very targeted content is probably not for everyone but there is growing interest both in the commercial and institutional fields. If you had to choose some topics that would work in this kind of environment, what would they be? Siebel Anniversary Quiz hits the 1000 Mark! Thanks to everyone who has taken part so far in the Siebel 20th Anniversary Quiz! We just sailed through the 1000 mark (1084 at the moment) and we are still seeing more players. It’s free, it’s fun and it is quite a challenge. Getting Social With Siebel #7 : Is it ready yet? In this final post in our little series about selecting a Social Engagement solution, we come to our last question. It is probably one of the most important, if not the most obvious. Question 8 : Is the solution ready yet? Of course, I hear you say. It is ready! I have seen the powerpoints and watched the (same) demo many times. But who is using it? Are there any companies out there you can talk to? Does the solution actually feel like a solution or just a bunch of loosely connected disparate applications? If you are looking for real integration into embedded processes and business flows, you might want to ask that question… Check out the list of Buzzient Features Ready to get started learning about Buzzient for Social Engagement? http://youtu.be/KFoy0pg9zfw Getting Social With Siebel #6 : User Friendly…or not? Getting Social with Siebel #6 : Following on from the previous post, we are looking again at the key questions to be asking yourself if you are envisaging a Social Engagement project involving Siebel CRM. Today we look first at a question that is sometimes (sadly) overlooked. Will your users have to cope with multiple windows and wildly differing user interfaces for each component? Will you be able to leverage the integration in both the UI and the Business Layer? So this is confusingly Question 7 but Getting Social with Siebel #6. Question 7 : Can my users seamlessly use the Social Engagement within the Siebel CRM system? At Buzzient this is a pretty simple question to answer. Of course. But is it so easy for other vendors to answer? The level of integration is usually revelatory in respect of the depth of Social Engagement, when you are assessing a vendor. Is this really an integration or just a thin piece of code to hang a series of different applications together. Check out the video below showing a typical engagement interaction. There is also a great click through demo on the same page. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_jOOGOAuwKA