Siebel CRM CAB @ Oracle Open World 2018

It's that time of the year when San Francisco is abuzz with Oracle Open World in full swing. As in the past several years, Oracle (Siebel) hosted its annual CRM Customer Advisory Board all day meeting on Sunday at Grand Hyatt, San Francisco. This year was special as the year marks the 25th anniversary of the founding of Siebel Systems. So the occasion made the CAB event a momentous and a special one.

Siebel CRM Strategy Update

Siebel CAB event started off with the customary strategy and roadmap update from George Jacob (GM and GVP of Siebel CRM). Some of the key updates from the strategy include:

Lifetime Support of Oracle Siebel
Oracle's reinforcement of commitment to support existing Oracle applications including Siebel. No plans to end support with premier support "through at least" 2030
Rolling 10 years of premier support.

Move from Centralized Mobile-Cloud to Distributed Edge-Intelligence

2000-20 - Centralized -> Mobile-Cloud
2020+ - Distributed -> Edge-Intelligence
Distributed Networks (OnPremise/Cloud/Edge)
Disconnected devices & mini data centers
AI & Machine Learning
Public & Private Data Centre Cores

Path to Digital Transformation

"Digital" being the top 10 strategic technology trends for 2018, Siebel strategy is aligned as such covering a broad spectrum of CRM actors such as Digital: User, Digital:Developer, User (including Mobile) to being Intelligent

Continuous Delivery

Non-stop delivery and release of Siebel through monthly updates on a single cumulative codeline
Release numbering changed to Year.Month of update

User Experience - Mobile

Extend Open UI responsive capabilities to mobile phones with minimal need for manual configuration; Phone apps generated automatically in client based on desktop based apps configuration
Alignment with Oracle Apps mobile design themes
Target around 80% usability

Continuous Integration & Continuous Delivery

Achieving business agility through Siebel has been one of the key strategies that Siebel has been driving towards over the last few years. The same theme was also the highlight of the Siebel CAB this year in the first half of the day long event. Siebel development team has been implementing tools and features along those lines that enable Siebel customers to help deliver innovation to their business users with extreme agility.

Dymensions - CI&CD Demo and Presentation

As part of this theme, Dymensions presented the end to end automated DevOps solution that can enable Siebel customers to achieve extreme business agility and help extend/leverage their investment on Siebel. It's a completely automated end to end Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery solution for Siebel CRM. The solution leverages most of the features that Siebel CRM provides as part of 17.x/18.x in addition to several other tools/solutions that Dymensions has built.

The presentation started off with a brief overview of the capabilities that Oracle(Siebel) released over the last couple of years followed by an overview of the CICD solution for Siebel powered by Dymensions. Darshan followed that up with a compelling demo showcasing user flow of a developer making a feature change (involving repository, files and application data) and subsequent governance flow to deliver, test and migrate the change from development to test to production using the following pipelines:

Pipeline to deliver changes from private branch and developer workspace to integration branch
Pipeline to migrate changes to test environment including set up, test automation and tear down including rollback
Pipeline to migration changes from dev to production upon successful completion of test runs and validation

Live Reporting

In addition to the pipeline demo of the CICD automated solution, the live reporting solution developed by Dymensions was also shown demonstrating the strong capabilities of reporting regarding the health of the Siebel environments.

Siebel CRM - CI&CD Presentation

Marc Verbeek (Oracle) presented how Oracle (Siebel) was using a CICD solution to automate the internal build and delivery process primarily to build and validate docker images both for OnPremise as well as for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

Customer Presentations & Demos

The second half of the CAB event focused primarily of customer demo's and presentations mainly centered around Customer Experience using Open UI.

Siebel CRM Integration with Live Experience Cloud - Integration of Live Experience Cloud with Siebel CRM using iFrames to allow for a modern interaction between customer and agent providing for a modern digital experience
Oakwood - Customer Success Modern Customer Experience using Open UI
Sleep Number - Customer Success B2C - Modern UI leveraging Open UI
Smiles - Customer Success Story of Siebel CRM on Cloud (OCI)

Perspective

Congratulations to Siebel for turning 25. Overall it was a great event from Dymensions perspective where in just under 20-25 minutes, we demonstrated a real-time configuration of Siebel CRM using workspaces, preview of those changes real-time through browser using Composer, migrating changes to Test environment to test real-time using Siebel Test Automaton Framework and upon successful validation deliver those changes to the main workspace and then migrating those changes to production environment. All of these were done in an automated fashion using pipeline including option to rollback in the event of any negative validation during test. All of this was done using Siebel CRM 18.9 (latest update of Siebel) running on Docker containers.

Dymensions has been innovating using the tools and solutions provided by Siebel 17/18 and building value added solutions to solve the DevOps problem that most of Siebel customers have. Siebel 17/18 brings more modern developer experience to its developers and users in addition to business agility and helps positioning the customers for the future.