At a town meeting for Siebel customers during Oracle’s OpenWorld conference, Oracle co-president Charles Phillips gave an assurance that the existing Siebel architecture would continue to be supported, including support for Siebel on IBM DB/2. He pointed out that there is no problem with the DB/2-based PeopleSoft, JD Edwards or Retek applications, so the Siebel addition will not represent a change.
There is no need for anyone to worry about disruption. If you were thinking about buying Siebel for a specific functional need, go ahead. You will continue to receive enhancements and support and it will be integrated with Oracle applications and infrastructure, said Mr Phillips. All products will move forward but there will be a path to Fusion too.
The timing is perfect, he added. If we are building Fusion we need the ideas and content now to build it into the next generation of products.
Although the deal is expected to close in January 2006, Oracle co-president Safra Catz believes it could be concluded within the next couple of months, on the grounds that that there are not expected to be any lengthy regularity issues because the US and European competition watchdogs know the market so well following their extensive reviews of the PeopleSoft acquisition.
On a more technical level, senior vice president of Oracle Applications John Wookey said the architectural work Siebel has been doing is similar to that of Oracle’s Project Fusion, moving in the same direction of an information-driven design.
As far as functionality is concerned, he said Siebel had a rich product footprint and Oracle will work out how to map its functionality to what Oracle does, but whatever it does it will be additive.
Oracle is looking to capitalize on Siebel’s work on analytics, particularly around vertical industries, while its business intelligence capabilities are expected to fit well with Oracle’s embedded approach. Oracle will also be taking a detailed look at Siebel’s CDI in relation to its parallel customer data hub offering because of its potential for integrating CRM tools.
The goal with the Siebel, as well as the PeopleSoft, JD Edwards and Oracle CRM products, is not just to cherry-pick functionality but also to use the current work as a springboard. Mr Wookey’s challenge to the Oracle applications design team is: Don’t take the best of the best but the best you can do. Learn from what has been done but don’t assume that anything that has been done was the best.
He also believes that CRM applications will have the longest active lifetime of any of the business applications: CRM is more challenging because of its need for industry specifics. It is the product area with the longest line of active development within the current product line.
However the fate of Siebel’s ongoing Nexus project, which is designed to provide for development of custom component-based CRM applications, is uncertain. Mr Phillips says too early to tell whether Nexus code would be used within Fusion. We will figure that out when we look under the covers more closely, he said.
