Before going through siebel roadmap, I would like to recap siebel achievements so far once Oracle acquired Siebel.
• Almost 20 year history of delivering best CRM solutions
• 21+ Industry specific capabilities and 22 languages supported in a single repository
• Thousands of Customers and Users worldwide
• 7 Releases delivered since Oracle has acquired Siebel CRM
• More than 90% of customers are on the latest 8.1/8.2 releases
Siebel Roadmap:
In snapshot you can see, 1st half of each year will have Fix Pack delivery where Oracle will provide bug fixes and 2nd half of each year will have Innovation pack which provides innovations and enhancements.
Investment Strategy by Oracle:
Oracle is mainly focusing on
1) Customer Experience
2) Industry Innovation
3) Lower implementation and maintenance cost
Customer Experience
We all know that Siebel was not very good in term of Customer Experience but with Open UI, Oracle has enhanced users experience and productivity a lot.
- Open UI supports any standard browser and any device
- Supports user specific look and feel UI
- Coexists with existing siebel architecture and investment
- Enhanced mobile application
- Online/Offline support
- Device reorganization and signature capture
- Redesign siebel ‘Out-of-box’ user interfaces like Dispatch board, chat, eservice
- Map integration, camera support, multi tab support
- Integration with social profile, supports ‘Big Data’
- Improved loyalty management
Industry Innovation
- Open UI has specialized line-of business applications
- Improved mobile application for financial services
- Redesigned eService application in Open UI to incorporate enhanced self service capabilities, reduce clicks, drill downs
Lower implementation and maintenance cost
Open UI supports existing Siebel architecture, also Oracle has introduced Incremental Repository Merge which reduces the Upgradation cost. It reduces the initial install size and time by 50%.
Siebel Upgrade Momentum:
Almost 90% customers are using Siebel 8.0 or higher version. Also all top brands from various verticals are using Siebel to run their business and number is still growing. Here is a snapshot below of siebel customers.
So come out from the rumor that Siebel is not alive anymore and keep learning. Oracle has a strong and rich product roadmap upto 2020+.
To know more, watch our YouTube video:
Unfortunately, the marketing talk from Oracle can only go a certain distance. The reality is CRM product implementation is simplified far more in the newer generation of products. The status quo of maintaining Siebel with small enhancements to ultimately make way to Sales/Service/Marketing cloud, is hurting Siebel.
I have seen CRM adoption rates of cloud products kick-in big time in the last 2 years. As a rule I do not see any new big ticket Siebel implementations. There are exceptions in larger customers, but they generally are not a happy lot after 8-12 months of implementation timeline.