SFDC Supporter: Siebel 8 was released in 2007 and Oracle’s controlled availability announcement ensures that there will never be a Siebel 9. Not only is Siebel innovation dead, but even bug fixes will come out less and less frequently. Mobility for Oracle is an afterthought. The traditional Siebel mobile apps are archaic and Open UI doesn’t deliver robust out-of-box capability.
#1. Oracle switched the numbering scheme that was publically used from Siebel 7, 8, etc to Innovation Pack 2013, 2014, 2015 etc. It is possibly correct that there will likely not be a Siebel 9, but it would be because of changed numbering scheme, not because Oracle stopped investing. Note that Oracle has increased the frequency of "bug fixes" from annual delivery of patch sets to monthly patching processes.
#2. As for Mobility, Siebel IP2013 release included connected and disconnected mobile capabilities (one year before Salesforce delivered disconnected). At this point we have many customers that are using Open UI to deploy Siebel on a variety of browsers and devices.
SFDC Supporter: If you are currently evaluating or using Siebel CRM, you should be aware that Oracle has revoked Siebel CRM’s generally available (GA) status and has put Siebel CRM on controlled availability (CA). Oracle putting Siebel on controlled availability is the first step towards end-of-life status. Oracle’s slow rate of innovation on Siebel will come to a halt.
Siebel is still being one of the Oracle's core products that is generally available to be sold to any customer. Additionally, Controlled Availability is a status that is used in many capacities including new product introduction and not only product retirement. Oracle has a robust roadmap defined for delivering innovation into the future using annual innovation packs.
SFDC Supporter: Oracle may continue to issue their two annual fix packs, but there will be fewer bug fixes and no interesting innovation in these fix packs.
Siebel does not deliver two annual fix packs. Siebel delivers an annual innovation pack and delivers monthly patch sets to resolve bugs. This is a huge increase in velocity in comparison with previous years.
SFDC Supporter: Oracle support will become more costly and provide a lower level of value. As Oracle forces its customers to move from premier support to extended support to sustaining support, the
maintenance costs rise and the benefits of the support service are reduced.
Over 82% of customers are on the latest release of Siebel which entitles them to premier support. The Oracle's support program guarantees Siebel customers an option for support with defined KPIs. Salesforce does not provide documented KPIs for customers without explicit CEO approval (according to Gartner). This means that Salesforce customers do not have a guaranteed support arrangement today.
SFDC Supporter: Ask yourself when was the last time you asked Oracle for a Siebel enhancement request and it came out in a new Siebel release?
See the roadmap for the 1000's of solutions that Oracle has delivered since Oracle acquired Siebel.
SFDC Supporter: Compare Siebel’s non-existent innovation with Salesforce’s 3 seamless releases every year. Upgrades require no work on our customer’s part and the service interruption for an upgrade is less than 5 minutes. Recent Salesforce releases include over 25,000 Idea Exchange points, ideas generated by and voted on by our customers. Salesforce is delivering real innovation to its customers.
Siebel is focused on delivering innovation around Customer Experience, Industry Innovations and Business Agility. Customers can access Oracle.com to discover what is being done in terms of innovations.
SFDC Supporter: Market Leadership
#1. Salesforce fails to highlight all of the solutions where Siebel is a leader. Contact analyst relations to obtain the Gartner Mega-vendors presentation shared in San Diego last year that highlighted the notable absence of Salesforce from Field Service, Marketing & CPQ Magic Quadrants / Market scopes.
#2. Siebel is also listed as a leader in many of the elements in these assessments that Salesforce highlighted.
#3. Also should note that Siebel provides On-Premise solutions where Salesforce does not. Gartner reported last year that less than 50% of customers have deployed in the cloud - what are those customers using?
#4. Siebel has thousands of customers and estimated millions of users.
#5. Siebel was also reported by Michael Maoz (Gartner) to be the only viable/proven option for large contact centers.
SFDC Supporter: Siebel CRM does not have a platform--customers need to procure a 3rd party platform for customizations and partners must build their own platforms.
#1. Siebel provides out of the box functionality for the following sample of solutions: Customer Master, Marketing/Loyalty, Sales, CPQ/Commerce and Service/Field Service.
#2. In addition, Siebel supports 20+ industries from the same solutions. All of these capabilities are delivered with native administration and extensibility through a common platform. By comparison, Salesforce does not provide the functional footprint of Siebel.
SFDC Supporter: The challenge for customers is none of the Oracle products work well together--and they certainly don’t work with Siebel. They have different UIs (some built in Oracle Java, others Microsoft .Net, others force.com), different customer models, different deployment models (cloud vs On Premise), and different customization tools. With Oracle’s announcement that Siebel has been relegated to controlled availability, there will be no further investment in integrating these products with Siebel.
#1. Siebel does not require the solutions mentioned to deliver business benefit to customers.
#2. Customers choosing to augment Siebel with these acquisitions will find a number of pre-built capabilities to support integration.
#3. There is a roadmap of integrations planned into the future to support existing Siebel customers and their desire to augment Siebel with additional functionality provided by newly acquired solutions.
#4. Salesforce used to praise the simplicity of cloud applications by claiming that customers did not have to worry about technology platforms. Since when has a vendor of cloud applications become so focused on customer in underlying technology platforms? Perhaps since Gartner called them out for having an inordinately complicated mishmash of technology platforms under their applications.
Salesforce portfolio Vs Oracle CRM portfolio. Oracle offers a CX suite to customers which provides a number of capabilities that allows them to stage meaningful and memorable experiences for their customers. Oracle Siebel is a core part of this CX suite and it is surrounded by a comprehensive portfolio of widely-used applications. CX is a specialty area where Oracle has synergistic solutions for commerce, sales & marketing, service & support, social, and insight. Oracle Siebel occupies an important place in this our CX product strategy. Thus, it is wrong to think that Siebel is going to disappear overnight. Consequently, various Oracle CX applications are integrated so that customers can amplify the business benefits that they can derive from the Oracle CX suite as a whole. As an example, Oracle Siebel is integrated with Oracle Social Relationship Management, Oracle Knowledge, and Oracle Policy Automation. Simply put, Salesforce plays a musical chairs version of buzzword bingo while Oracle delivers customer experience solutions.
Salesforce does not offer an enterprise-class service automation platform. Despite being the best positioned product in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Customer Engagement Center 2014 report (here), significant product cautions have been included for Salesforce Service Cloud. These include, "As clients build out more-complex CEC capabilities, they discover maintenance complexities that were not apparent when the installations were simpler...", "Salesforce support does not demonstrate sufficient depth or consistency yet to deal with a global set of complex customer service environments in a timely manner", "References relate that product pricing for complex customer service environments is not as transparent as the published guidelines suggest", "The vendor is only at the beginning of addressing the needs of large, complex, retail, B2C contact centers...", and "The company has limited Asian, South American or Eastern European presence in larger-scale (more than 200 seats) CECs." This indicates that while Salesforce may be able to perform well in a subset of the business processes related to service automation they clearly do not deliver business processes across the full spectrum of service & support areas. In contrast, Oracle Siebel has proven itself, across geographies and industries, as a massively scalable platform that powers game changing service engagements on a daily basis.
Salesforce AppExchange model is fundamentally flawed. The AppExchange model is often positioned as the solution to the functional gaps and missing capabilities in Salesforce. Examples, of this, in the case of Service Cloud, are apps for customer surveys, agent co-browsing, click-to-call, and virtual agent. Customers should beware of using AppExchange apps to compensate for lack of primary and/or foundational functionality in the base application. There are two main reasons for this which are (1) transaction costs and (2) integration risks. First of all, third party apps are sold by different vendors and the customer has to run as many procurement cycles as the number of apps that they need to use. These costs of scoping, screening, selecting, and sourcing various third party apps can be quite high as they are offered by large vendors as well as independent developers. The customer has to realize that they are potentially not dealing with a reputed software firm but rather with an unknown and unproven software developers. Secondly, while each third party app is certified for integration with Salesforce it is not necessarily certified for integration with all the other third party apps that a customer has sourced. This means that if multiple third party apps do not integrate properly with each other then the customer needs to fix this problem which results in costs. If the customer wants to do some due diligence upfront to confirm that their third party apps will work together nicely then that will lead to a cumbersome selection process. For this reason, it is worth pointing out that the list of apps on AppExchange should not be regarded as a big range of choices as dependencies and compatibilities between the apps will determine those that can viably cooperate. Oracle's App Marketplace is a key initiative however the apps available on it are not meant as substitutes or fillers for primary and/or foundational functionality in the base application.
Salesforce confuses industry content with industry selling. Despite the fanfare that has surrounded their “industry strategy”— Salesforce hasn’t failed to underwhelm. Instead of revealing a comprehensive portfolio of pre-built industry content within their applications Salesforce has pitched an industry sales model in its place. Regrettably for Salesforce they launched this misinformation campaign against an Oracle solution (i.e., Siebel) that has led the CRM space for almost two decades with its out-of-the-box industry content. While Salesforce paraded its “thought leaders” and “industry shapers”— it did not divulge when or how it will deliver pre-built industry content to its CRM customers. It merely described a sales structure and go-to-market plan geared around vertical messaging. To be fair, they also included a navigational taxonomy on their AppExchange that allows a user to browse third-party apps by industry. Indeed, their work to date, in this area, has been to deliver a framework and a demo, but not industry-specific application content. This forces customers to take the framework that is given to them and trust that they can create an industry solution on their own. Customers have to build data/schema, policies, common flows and UI to represent industry content by themselves or via consultants. Their offering comes nowhere near the out-of-the-box industry business content that is delivered with Oracle Siebel. Moreover, the value potential of this business content is amplified by the industry-specific business processes and business rules supported by Siebel. So, what Oracle Siebel provides to a customer helps that customer to shorten their time to value, gain business certainty, and benefit from context-relevant intellectual property. This frees them up our customers to focus their resources on their core business activities of innovating, competing, and winning. By contrast, Salesforce gives its customers flashy web-pages, vapourware demos, animated videos, and misinformation campaigns.
So, my verdict, if you are a small scale company without any existing back end systems like billing, invoicing, logistics etc. then Oracle CX or SFDC could be a quick winner – very easy to setup and start the ball rolling. Oracle CX or SFDC struggles when it comes to integrating with your existing enterprises – as there is no robust integration layer in SFDC – you may have to invest heavily to get Oracle CX or SFDC integrated with your existing systems. But, if you are a enterprise organization having complex systems supporting your operations then Siebel would be your solution as it sits next to them and exposes all capabilities to integrate neatly with your existing architecture. SFDC also not cheap! You also need to understand the overall cost associated with both the products on a long run – read this interesting article to get a bit of insight - Siebel vs. Salesforce.com on cost
I was bit off the track; will resume with my Open UI discussions shortly ;)
Shiv
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