Oracle World 2008, 9/25, 10:30am

Siebel Integration Options

Web svc usage has grown exponentially, connectors have declined rapidly. Connectors are likely to be removed in future versions. CORBA on the way out as well since its been replaced by Java.

MSMQ is not being developed any further.

MQSeries is very popular with developments for dynamic queuing. Customer base moving toward JMS and Websphere MQ.

Java Business Service has growing use from customers and leverage classes deployed on app servers.

JMS is the Oracle preferred solution for Reliable Messaging. Also IBM preferred solution.

UI Data Adapter for putting a diff't front end Siebel. Rapid solution development.

Web Services is of two flavors: ASI (for CRUD basic functions) and Functional (to expose enterprise specific services and processes).

SOA Suite integration topology: JMS Messges & Web Service Calls to a SOA Suite w/ ESB

BI Publisher allows for report development that is not dependent on a new compile on srf. Has same benefits of actuate (context/view specific). Enabled via web services.

Siebel Enterprise Manager v1 proposed features:

• ADM - EM integration
• Multi-server install
• Server/Enterprise cloning
• Configuration audit & rollback

Integration evolution:

Siebel EAI has limited standards support (lots of 1.0 versions). This indicates an old stack.

Looking to move to Web Logic Server to be the outer face of Siebel EAI with wider standards support (OASIS 2004, OASIS 2006, WS_Trust 1.3, HTTP Publish/Subscribe)

Siebel EAI stack is being frozen for new functionality while Web Logic Server infrastructure is built out.

Oracle World 2008, 9/25, 9am

Enterprise 2.0: New face of CRM





"post comment"?





"the groundswell is: a social trend in which people use technologies to get things they need tfrom each other, rather than from traditional institutions like corporations" Charlene Li





HBR 2006 study: 52% have trouble populating/maintaining data, 41% getting user acceptance





social computing does not require any training





"Adaptive Path" camera analogy





Siebel 8.0 Task Based Interface, provides guidance and highlites areas to complete





ipod analogy: ipod itself is easy, simple, limited but itunes provides much more functionality





ipod them extended to CRM gadgets. most basic, most easily consumed functions. more complex interactions are done in the app and is only a click away.





gadgets are in beta (Mandeep.Bhullar@oracle.com)





If you click the phone number, the click is captured in crm w/ time of call. call service is in the cloud and rings your own mobile if it is registered in the service. All visibilty rules are applied.





Gadgets are based on Adobe Air (mac, windows, linux) , not google desktop





For the browser, igoogle or flash



Contact Gadget: your contacts, click to talk, you get voice analytics which will determine best time to call. Contacts can be categorized and tagged, social networks can be searched. Search window does predictive searching. Searches are captured as well to get trends. For example, doing a search on a problem.





Improving the interface: old way: process->data-> technology. new way: experience->features->technology = Process Centric to User Centric design





Report Less, Sell More





Radar Demo: shows contacts and when they were last contacted in a graph. quadrants include new customers, prospects, active, inactive to visually see which contacts need to be called. Amazing! Can be extended to service requests for aging service requests. had a rollo-dex interface for contacts based on Adobe Flex.

oracle has a twitter channel

given the volume of information using blogs, twitter, etc. how can it all be consumed? the demo of the oracle flex view of tag clouds to view what people are saying about your product. can also be used to look inward at what sales people are saying about deals. can also be pointed to email to scan headers and jog memory regarding conversations.

key themes: community, collaboration, content

Oracle World 2008, 9/24, 1pm

SARM BEST PRACTICES

Siebel Application Response Management
Should help address these questions:
*where is the bottleneck for transaction x by user y
*which screen/view/bizcomp/script/wf were involved
*how much cpu and memory was consumed
*how many times were vaious components invoked
*how has transaction processiona nd resource consumption changed from release to release

SARM consists of framework, instrumentation, and tools
Oracle Enterprise Manager - management of the entire stack (app, middle, db) became available for Siebel 7.7 and up

Siebel Transaction Diagnostic Tool
*guidance: turn on SARM, level 1 w/ no overhead
*sarm is saved into a memory buffer to alleviate disk IO
*sarm data is flushed into the siebel file system in binary which can be converted to csv post processing (command line tool)
*sarm takes 3 to 4 % cpu
*sarm calls are < 40 microseconds per call
*based on benhcmark with 500 concurrent users, 30 seconds think time, on call center

sarm parameters set on siebel server, environment variables set on web and app server
0-off
1-monitoring
2-diagnostic
buffer default: 5,000,000 bytes
flush period: 3 (mins) default
max files: 4 default
file size: default 15,000,000 bytes

level 1 is considered best practice, you want it turned on for the obj manager that end users interact with

siebel 7.5, requires a bounce of servers.. later versions do not require
siebel 8 allows you to turn it on for a specific user

Best practices:
Use SARM throughout app lifecycle
Use SARM during pre-prod load tests
Use SARM for monitoring in production
Take SARM snapshots periodically (before a change to the prod environment) for comparisons

DEMO: featuring oracle enterprise manager, to find slow performance by user CCHENG
*report generated based on filtering on start/end dates showing summary of performance of each transaction request
*each sarm request can be drilled down to get to the bottleneck but cannot get to the sql statement by drilldown, but its in progress for a future release.
*for now, use sarm id to correlate to generated sql.
*if a scripting issue, the SARM tool will indicate script name!

Oracle World 2008, 9/24, 1030 am

Partner Ecosystem for CRMOD:

active prime: real time deduplication/dq
anetnna software: mobile devices
big machines: quote building service
blueroads: lead generation
castiron: application integrations
eloqua: marketing
helpstream: self serv
hoovers connect: social networking data
inside view: social information and other news
ribbit: voicemail and softphone in action bar
right90: sales forecasting
savo: document management
vovici
white springs: sales methodology

Demo:looked at opty and launched white springs to see methodology and see contacts and their relationship on decison maker. Site has 3 tabs: methodology, stakeholder analysis, and actions.
Added new contact in CRMOD which has active prime. User was prompted with matching contacts using some fuzzy logic (cusomizable?)

Right90 offers demand forecasting (excel look/feel) change history is captured, can do a ramp up or decay on attributes about the revenue item and spread across the period

Eloqua offers lead scoring for a given program. Leads can be ranked and pushed into CRMOD. in CRMOD, you can drill into the lead and see the eloqua activities (click thru, visited site)

Case study from shoretel (nasdaq SHOR):on premise for call center: account system of record, support/case mgmt

They use CRMOD for lead/oppty management, general sfa, marketing mdf. using big machines, cast iron, and eloqua.

Big machines is a quote building service which creates orders in the back office erp w/ bidierectional status data, they use cast iron which integrates syspro with siebel bidirectionally, only took 10 days to build out. Eloqua for lead generation replaced csv manual entry. configuration/integration done in 45 days

Case study from intelenex:integrated crmod, cast iron, xactly, and big machines
xactly handles the incentive compensation

sfdc is unable to provide integration references!

Oracle World 2008, 9/24, 9 am

Real ROI: Business Case for Upgrading to Latest Release of Siebel

Siebel 7.5.3 ends Dec 10 2008

Justifying upgrade to CIO, CFO based on 5000 users, 7.5. to 8.
Cost table based on ROI calculator on ID 738922.1 on Metalink.
TCO goes from .86 to .67 to .49 (7.5 to 7.7/7.8 to 8.0/8.1) based on effort (person hour) and configuration and operations for one year.
Application Deployment Manager should decrease deployment costs by 75%
Siebel Business Rules engine (code base becomes metadata) should save 5 to 15% in costs
Siebel 8.x improves hardware ROI - 30% scalability w/ current HW
For this scenario, upgrade cost = 550k, maintenance costs go from 2.5 million/yr to 1.3 million/yr. Over 3 yrs, IT/CFO savings are 1.2 million/year. Total 3 yr savings is 3.05 million with payback in 6 months.
Based on:

• Medium complexity has 80k to 200k lines of scrip and 20 to 40 wf, and 50 to 80 custom bc.
• Upgrade assessment 65k to 70k
• Upgrade execution (configure, validate, deploy) go to from 350k to 650k

Using the same use case, what else will you get?

• Using Real-Time Decisioning in the product
• Pricing Management
• AIA/PIP for integration w/ CRMOD

Home Shopping Network Case Study
HSN needed to upgrade w/ no downtime. Siebel is the call center for 2k reps. Converted 400k lines of vb to escript, 30 real time interfaces, 100 batch interfaces. Two step upgrade from 6.2 to 7.8 to 8.0. eSales w/ 250k visitors a day. Business measured as $/min. 2 TB db.

Gradual migration: live w/ 6.2 and 8.0 w/ real time integration for 3 mos.

Used GoldenGate software to assist with synchronization between 2 live Siebel instances. Takes care of conflict resolution at the db layer. Both systems: active/active. This also helps with rollback since systems are both active.

Total was 26months and $8 million budget. 3 month phased rollout. They spent 7 months doing mock upgrades to tune the process. Took 3 months to do the conflict resolution and eScript migration. UAT and Int testing was 4 months. 3 upgrade consultants for 12 months. 40 FTE (Siebel, backoffice, Infrastructure)



UPS New Implementation of Siebel 8
12k call center agents. Replaced multiple call center apps with one global case management system with multiple languages (7!)

Key benefits: reduced AHT (avg handle time), improved work hand-offs and operational efficiencies leading to 21 million in savings over 5 yrs. Took advantage of:

• Task based UI
• Case Insensitivity
• Enhanced Deployment tools
• New UI look/feel for better user experience
• Business Rules engine
• Enhanced SOA capabilities
• Improved stability
• Supported path to Oracle Fusion CRM
• 3 Phase deployment after 3 month feasibility study

Oracle World 2008, 9/23, 3pm and beyond!

3:00 pm:

Keynote – Paul Otellini, CEO of Intel

Otellini was pushing the idea that time is money and highlighted all of the industries that Oracle/Intel collaborate in which time = money. Key takeaway: Getting to data faster, processing transactions faster all equate to cost savings, sometimes life savings, if you are a health-care related company.

Rest of the keynote was by Thomas Kurian a vp at Oracle. He showed a lot more of the Fusion apps like BI, Beehive, Content Management and Identity Mangement. Its still somewhat “con-fusion” as far as I can tell. A lot of transitional type apps but the end state is clear: complete, open, and integrated.




Vendor Expo:

The Oracle hands-on demo of CRMOD was enlightening. Very popular booth but I got a few questions in:

How are configurations migrated from stage to prod? Unfortunately transferring configurations is manual from instance to instance.

How configurable is the look/feel? Very. All style sheet driven.

How are territories managed? Assignment manager type application.

How real-time is the analytic dashboards? They are cached for performance reasons but can be refreshed, on-demand.

Are custom objects exposable through the web service framework? Yes, they enable all CRUD functionality even for custom objects. As simple as pushing a button to generate the wsdl.

I saw some of the embedded partner apps and got a better feeling for level of customizations that can be done by listening in on some customer conversations.

Oracle Open World 2008, 9/23, 1 pm

Analytics Roadmap

Sales Analytics - improve pipeline visibilty, forecast accuracy, sales effectiveness

Prebuilt star schemas, pre-mapped metadata for quicker deployments

311 customer center testimonial: public facing bi (CPR) to track City department performance. Underscores getting analytics to the front line.

Hyperion offers desktop gadgets. OBIEE has interactive analytics for the iphone.

Oracle RTD offers predictive customer offerings based on data criteria such as web usage, timing, customer profile, similar customers. Looks to be a solid value add for web content and delivering right-content at the right-time. Self-learning product.

Future directions: pricing management, customer loyalty (profitability, member tier analysis), case analytics.

More iphone enablement!