Siebel Upgrades

While cloud based CRM applications get upgraded by the provider directly, the same cannot be said about traditional on premise CRM solutions. This is true specifically in the case of Siebel CRM deployments. Since 2013, Oracle has been consistently delivering enhancements to the application year on year in terms of Innovation packs.

The key change has been the deployment of the Open UI architecture. While this came out with the Siebel Version 8.1.1.9 or patchset 9 on top of Siebel version 8.1.1. The open UI architecture dramatically changed the user perception around the Siebel UI, since this effectively made Siebel browser independent from the previous dependence on Internet Explorer. The earlier dependence was primarily because the Siebel High interactivity client was heavily dependent on Active X controls.  Over the last few years as Oracle launched the innovation packs (IP 2015 is current) , this dependency has been done away with.

The new innovation packs are also adding in a lot of processes along with fixing bugs on the way. The biggest of the changes is that with IP 2015 , Siebel tools, which was a thick client being used for any kind of development has now become Siebel composer (Still in a beta version, IP 2016 is expected to have the complete version), a web based tool similar to most of the development clients for Cloud CRM’s. This significantly reduces development and deployment times and finally we can have zero downtime deployments as is common with most cloud applications.

The question which is typically asked is as to why the upgrade should be done.

Why should we upgrade to the new version?

• Siebel 8.X supports only the high interactivity framework. This is supported officially only on IE 8.0. IE 8.0 is no longer supported by Microsoft. While there are ways to make the HI framework work on IE 9 and higher, these are not supported by Oracle. As per recent updates Microsoft is no longer supporting any IE version and instead supports only the edge browser.
• A lot of objects which are standard in the newer version were not available in the older versions. This led to customizations in terms of new tables, business components, business objects and the relevant UI objects on top of these. The new objects effectively make the custom objects redundant.
• Most of the older versions of Siebel were dependent on scripting for basic things like data validations and these have been carried forward through the previous upgrades. Siebel, over the last few versions, has been reducing the dependence on scripting and increasing the dependence on workflows. These are available out of the box.
• Due to the lack of a proper workflow engine in the previous versions, customers had a tendency of putting in business services for managing the business logic. The newer version would have a lot of these business logic by default.
• The data models have been changed dramatically. As an example the address model has been completely changed. In versions prior to Siebel 8.0, Siebel had a concept of maintaining business addresses (Account Address) and personal addresses (Contact Address) separately. This was changed completely by having one common address table and maintaining intersection tables and the relevant joins for accounts and contacts.
• The Siebel horizontal application (SEA) does not exist anymore. The organizations must migrate to Siebel industry applications (SIA).

With multiple successful  Siebel upgrade projects under our belt , we will be happy to assist . Please contact us for more information.