Siebel CRM: Migrating to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Benefits
Starting in 1993, Siebel CRM Systems was a software company mainly engaged in developing customer relationship management (CRM) applications. Siebel CRM delivered a combination of features to manage all customer-facing operations. With features tailored to different industries, Siebel CRM provided comprehensive on-premise solutions tailored to specific industry needs with role-based customer intelligence and pre-built integration.
The CRM market quickly expanded in the 1990s with new devices and channels, both for internal and customer-facing use. During this time, Siebel was the dominant CRM vendor, peaking at 45% market share in 2002. Several years later, Oracle acquired Siebel Systems in 2006 and started selling Oracle Siebel CRM in 2007. Oracle’s Siebel CRM is a widely used and popular CRM application. Several best practices for high availability, security, scalability, performance, and disaster recovery for running Oracle Siebel CRM systems on Cloud.
Oracle Siebel CRM Cloud Migration
Users can migrate most on-premise Oracle Siebel CRM deployments to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) with minimal effort to configuration, integration, or business processes. On OCI, users typically experience higher performance, better reliability, and lower cost versus continuing to run their Siebel CRM deployments on-premise or on another cloud.
Oracle provides a baseline architecture that optimizes the OCI capabilities and addresses essential technical and business requirements. This architecture enables users to achieve their deployment objectives quickly without extensive testing. Moving from on-premise Siebel CRM to the cloud depends on the users’ environment, customized configurations, and the applications that use their data sources. Since most users customize their CRM to fit business processes and other office systems, replacing it with an alternative cloud product could incur unnecessary risk and cost.
Users can migrate their Siebel system to OCI for better support during batch processes and peak seasons, the agility to use new capabilities when released, and lower the total cost of ownership (TCO). With OCI, users control their Siebel CRM environment and can use the same software, licenses, and training.
“I’m responsible for working with infrastructure as a service(IaaS) cloud partners, like SoftClouds, and making sure Siebel with IaaS clouds is a success. IaaS is a highly automated offering in which computing resources owned by a service provider are offered to customers on demand.”
- Mark Farrier, Director — Product Management, Oracle
Oracle Siebel CRM on Cloud vs. On-Premise
Running Siebel on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure is more affordable — it’s 35% less expensive than running Siebel on-premise after five years and 63% cheaper than running on another cloud after five years. Siebel users with on-premise data centers typically pay hardware support costs, virtualization licensing and support costs, data center costs, etc. You can eliminate or reduce all of these by moving to OCI. You benefit from the economies of scale and efficiencies that Cloud provides and pay for only the computer storage and other resources you use. Listed below are additional benefits:
- Fast Infrastructure Access: Developing infrastructure (testing, training, fixing) has to be repeated for various environments, which compounds the costs and causes significant delays. With Cloud, you can provide new infrastructure and Siebel environments in hours , compared to weeks or months, to procure and deploy traditional infrastructure.
- No Clustering: On-premise failures have to be handled on a case-by-case basis. Failed parts have to be procured and replaced. Key components such as the Siebel Gateway Name Server must be clustered using expensive clustering software. Deployment is still limited by the ability to handle only one failure in the primary gateway. With Cloud, clustering of the Siebel gateway isn’t required. The Siebel Gateway Name Server is a single point of failure. On-premise implementations require you to cluster the gateway, which is expensive.
- Quickly Scale Usage: Customers often oversize environments for initial phases and can’t cope with growth in later stages. With Cloud, you can scale the usage up or down. You only pay for the computing capacity you use and the duration you use it.
- Standby Disaster Recovery: You can build highly low-cost standby disaster recovery (DR) environments for existing deployments and incur costs for the outage duration. Customers with on-premise data centers face the issue of limited settings. For instance, a test environment will have a newer release compared to a production environment. If a problem is found in production, you have no way to provide a performance debugging environment suddenly.
- No Hardware Purchases: You own hardware that depreciates every year in an on-premise environment. You’re locked in to the price and capacity of the hardware once you acquire it, and you have ongoing hardware support costs. With Cloud, you can switch your underlying Siebel instances to newer Cloud instance types as they become available. All hardware platforms have end-of-life (EOL) dates when the existing hardware is no more extended support, and you’re forced to buy new hardware. In the Cloud, you can upgrade your software version to new Cloud versions in a single click, at no cost for the upgrade.
- Minimize Performance Issues: Performance testing is recommended before any significant change to a Siebel environment. However, most customers performance tests their Siebel CRM applications only during the initial launch on the yet-to-be-deployed production hardware. Later releases usually don’t need to be performance-tested due to the expense and lack of the environment required for performance testing. With Cloud, you can minimize the risk of discovering performance issues later in production.
- Reduce Performance Testing: Most customers only do performance testing for Siebel changes either on initial implementation or when they have Siebel upgrades to put in place. Performance testing for customer enhancements is rarely continually done. Cloud enables you to do performance testing at minimal cost because you’re only charged for the resources you use when you use them. This minimal cost allows more realistic testing, both for Siebel upgrades and for your enhancements.
“Implementation of Siebel on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) is proven to achieve the estimated total cost of ownership for five years and can be up to 35% less than running Siebel on-premises and up to 63% less than running on any other cloud.”
- Balaji Ramachandran — Chief Executive Officer, SoftClouds LLC
Oracle Siebel CRM Cloud Use Cases
The following are some industry use cases that Siebel on OCI has been used for:
- After modernization and simplifying the existing Siebel CRM application at one of central Europe’s biggest automotive companies by Riverland Reply, the company achieved a clean, optimized, and non-cluttered structure, twice the improvement in satisfaction score, and reduced process completion time.
- A postpaid transformation journey of Airtel India with 36M customers, 11M transactions per day, and 16K user sessions resulted in a reduction in customer issues by 95%, a single view of the entire customer base, and a dramatic decrease in response time.
- An up-gradation project of Siebel from IP 2013 to 20 for TPG Telecom realized the following benefits: 20% improvement in the sales journey, 30% improvement in performance across all transactions, and reduced time to market by 40%.
- Siebel CRM’s Clinical Trial Management Service is a world leader and has been a primary tool for clinical trials for 10–15 years. Automated workflow, scalability, multi-lingual enablement, flexible cloud upgrade, etc., differentiate this application from others.
“Siebel on OCI leverages Oracle’s cloud computing services, provides cloud infrastructure benefits to Siebel customers, and reduces the total Cost of ownership (TCO) in multiple areas. Siebel on OCI also provides the ability to increase the capabilities of Siebel with High Availability, Disaster Recovery and Performance. If you are yet to get your Siebel on OCI, I highly recommend you do so.”
- Saravanan Pitchai — Senior Siebel/Software Architect, SoftClouds LLC
My Thoughts:
We believe migrating the Siebel to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure can enhance its multi-capabilities. Siebel CRM has been a top CRM solution across many organizations and has been applied across 20 different industries. It has tools that help companies to manage their daily operations. New developments can be added with the help of Siebel CRM, and effective results have been shown by many companies that are using Siebel CRM. By moving Siebel to OCI, operational issues are decreased, and lifecycle management is improved. It enables end-to-end testing and single-vendor support. Users can receive non-stop up-gradation alerts on the cloud. Observability and maintenance capabilities are greatly enhanced.
SoftClouds, as an Oracle Platinum Partner and a member of the Siebel Customer Advisory Board for years, offers best-in-class solutions to help and facilitate a seamless migration from Siebel on-premise to the cloud. Are you cloud-ready?
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This post was written by Saravanan Pitchai, Software Engineer at SoftClouds. Saravanan has over 15+ years of experience in IT and has architected various Siebel Solutions for global multinational companies in the airline, telecom, and energy domains. Highly analytical and an expert in architecting and building Siebel solutions, Saravanan has extensive experience in Siebel on-premise and in the cloud. Being an innovator, he firmly believes Siebel on OCI will accelerate adoption and migration to the cloud.
SoftClouds is a recognized leader in CRM/CX transformation with experience in numerous service cloud implementations with pre-configured best practice business processes for multiple verticals/domains.
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