February 1stOracle Releases Siebel CRM 8
Christopher Kenton
[tag]Oracle[/tag] announced the wide release of Siebel 8 at its global “Applications Unlimited” event, the latest upgrade to an application platform that includes Siebel Sales, Siebel Enterprise Marketing, Siebel Customer Order Management, Siebel Contact Center and Service, Siebel Universal Customer Master, and Siebel Self-Service and eBilling. The key talking points of their release focus on the most common customer pain points, including integration, cost-of-ownership and ease-of-use. And of course, all of these issues are resolved “out-of-the-box” with version 8.
Oracle is promoting a short list of usability features including improved search, ability to change business rules on the fly through a drag-and-drop interface, and apparantly some kind of wizard system to guide newbies through unfamiliar tasks. But the interesting news is that Siebel 8 will apparently provide support for some of Oracle’s competing technologies, including IBM WebSphere and BEA Weblogic, and Microsoft’s SQL Server 2005 and IBM’s DB2. Siebel 8 will also support Linux, through Oracle’s Unbreakable Linux program.
It’s always fun to reverse prepackaged PR announcements. When Oracle is pumping Siebel 8’s value proposition as an easy-to-integrate, easy-to-use system that lowers total cost of ownership, does that mean they’re fighting a rep for systems that are expensive, clunky and hard to integrate? Last I remember, those were all issues people were complaining about 3 revs ago.
[tag]Oracle[/tag] announced the wide release of Siebel 8 at its global “Applications Unlimited” event, the latest upgrade to an application platform that includes Siebel Sales, Siebel Enterprise Marketing, Siebel Customer Order Management, Siebel Contact Center and Service, Siebel Universal Customer Master, and Siebel Self-Service and eBilling. The key talking points of their release focus on the most common customer pain points, including integration, cost-of-ownership and ease-of-use. And of course, all of these issues are resolved “out-of-the-box” with version 8.
Oracle is promoting a short list of usability features including improved search, ability to change business rules on the fly through a drag-and-drop interface, and apparantly some kind of wizard system to guide newbies through unfamiliar tasks. But the interesting news is that Siebel 8 will apparently provide support for some of Oracle’s competing technologies, including IBM WebSphere and BEA Weblogic, and Microsoft’s SQL Server 2005 and IBM’s DB2. Siebel 8 will also support Linux, through Oracle’s Unbreakable Linux program.
It’s always fun to reverse prepackaged PR announcements. When Oracle is pumping Siebel 8’s value proposition as an easy-to-integrate, easy-to-use system that lowers total cost of ownership, does that mean they’re fighting a rep for systems that are expensive, clunky and hard to integrate? Last I remember, those were all issues people were complaining about 3 revs ago.
Support for third-party products in Siebel is really not all that interesting. Siebel has supported these products 2 - 3 releases ago:
- Interfaces to Webspere and Weblogic were already supported via Siebel’s JMS Transport. But were also supported via UAN.
- Imagine telling customers with MS SQL or IBM DB/2 that they are no longer supported. Drive them to the competition.
- The SOA stuff is the funniest…. Siebel has supported the associated technologies (Web Services, XML, SOAP, WSDL, XSD) for sometime now. And the UAN product supported BPEL, specifically in Webspere and Web Logic. Both of these products were already certified to work with Siebel. Sounds like they just certified Oracle’s BPEL and ESB servers. But they all use standards associated with SOA so it’s really nothing new
- The Workflow Task crap is a combination of modules in two previous versions… SmartScript, and the User Interact step in standard workflow process…. smoking mirrors.
February 14th, 2007 at 3:04 pm