Siebel Upgrade Vs moving into cloud - my analysis!

I have been working in Siebel world for almost 12 year now. I am a big fan of Siebel architecture and the flexibility this product offers to cater for all sorts of weird business needs. I have played various roles including developer, designer, architect and functional expert. Presently working as CRM Manager at CHEP (www.chep.com) looking after the Siebel delivery.

Last year, in my company we were on Siebel 7.8 version and I was thrown into a situation – do we really need to upgrade Siebel or throw it and bring other cloud based solutions. So, I decided to go to the bottom of this analysis and conclude what is best for the organization. I picked up all the leading CRM suites available in the market and did a round 1 bird’s eye view comparison and we decided to stick to two leading could providers salesforce and CRMoD by oracle and of course existing Siebel.

It followed by series of workshops, POCs and meetings with Oracle & salesforce.com.  As you know, I can be biased towards Siebel – but I took a neutral stand to evaluate these cloud based solutions – to do apple to apple comparison in all aspects.

We decided these key criteria for evaluation:

·        Look and Feel

·        Out of the box CRM capabilities

·        Ease of configuration/customization to tailor it for our needs

·        Integration with host of existing backend ERP/BI systems.

·        Mobility – support for tablets and smartphones

·        Analytics – rich reports, dashboards and alerts

·        Cost!

*note it’s my personal opinion and my judgement based on the workshops and researches.

So, the verdict:

Siebel upgrade:

Pros:

-      Cheapest option

-      Company is accustomed with Siebel both at IT and business side

-      Oracle road map for Siebel looks promising. Open UI coming up.  

Cons:

-      Lower user adoption due to complex and huge screens

-      No support for Mobility

-      Still need to manage and maintain all hardware systems to support Siebel

Oracle CRM On Demand:

Pros:

-      Cheaper compared to salesforce.com

-      Meets all current and future business needs

-      Offline, Mobility and BI fully supported

-      Removes hardware support costs

Cons:

-      Huge impacts on business while moving from Siebel to CRMoD.

-      Might miss some functionality - CRMoD may not be able to support all complex processes that are configured on Siebel.

-      Need to have a separate integration layer to support integrations with back-end ERP and BI systems

Salesforce.com: was rejected mainly on due to the cost associated with the licenses.

When we presented above to business, the obvious choice for them was to upgrade Siebel and stay with it – play safe!

Business reasons to approve Siebel upgrade rather than to move to CRMoD:

-      Fear of unknown

o   Siebel is in use from around 15 years and users are comfortable in using it - though they complaint about the usability.

o   Business wasn't confident that all their custom processes will be fulfilled by CRMoD

-      There wasn't any significant cost benefit by moving out of Siebel

-      Open UI looked promising –it will make Siebel to match with other cloud based solutions

After above decision, the choice was obvious to go for Siebel upgrade. It took us 4 months to complete the upgrade from Siebel 7.8 SEA-Non Unicode to Siebel 8.1.1.7 SIA-Unicode. We had expert advice from a small but expert company called Ponder Pro. They helped us in doing DEV, TEST and Production upgrade seamlessly. They also helped us to fix any performance issues encountered by the users.

Since Apr-2013, our users have been using Siebel 8.1. The platform has been really promising – performing at it’s peak.  

In between, we have applied 8.1.1.10, 8.1.1.11 PS 4 on our systems.

The Siebel journey continues…eagerly waiting for Open UI and Open UI mobile roll-out.