Monday, January 28, 2019

Siebel is dead (at least for me)

Introduction

This post is a biased point of view for what I see about Siebel future as well the professionals involved with it. Also, consider that my personal point of view is strongly attached to the economical situation here in Brazil and the local CRM market itself.

To the details

Back a few years ago, when I joined Oracle as an employee, specifically to work supporting Siebel customers, I thought I would finally improve my expertise by orders of magnitude (specially due the expose to internal material and working with other experts).
That was at 2014. Salesforce was taking a lot of companies that were previous Siebel users, but there was still hope for professionals. At least outside Oracle.
As a Oracle employee, I was expecting to get to know new professionals that worked with Siebel, specially those that had came from the former company. I did met a couple of them, but the vast majority of them were not working with Siebel anymore, or were not specialists (full time dedicated to the application).
So, we had basically two groups of "Siebel people" over there: one that had worked more than 10 years with Siebel but sadly had to be moved to another team/product because Siebel was not "mainstream" anymore, and a second group that was formed by people without previous proper training with Siebel and was "thrown to the lions" to support or provide consultancy in something they didn't have experience.
About the former group, yes, you might argument that Oracle has to maintain all solutions until 2024 by contract, but that doesn't mean Oracle wanted to keep investing in Siebel. Yes, there were new releases, but most of the features were related to OpenUI and that seems to me like "let's do the minimum required" than anything else because Microsoft Internet Explorer was basically a walking dead and all companies were trying to get rid of it. If you worked with Siebel for a while, you probably know that it has it's roots were Microsoft based architecture, and the High Interactive web client was completely dependent of IE. I bet that are still important unhanded bugs in the C++ code base from 2014 (I know that since I had opened some myself). Let's not talk about Mainwin on UNIX-like OS or even the "attachments" developed in J2EE...
Already in 2014, sales department of Brazil's office were not offering customer Siebel as a CRM solution. There was the vaporware called Fusion (that I don't think so something was released till today) and other solutions that were acquired by Oracle and that's it. Any company that had interest in Siebel would have to explicit ask for it to a sales representative. Keep in mind too that Larry Ellisson is/was a Salesforce investor too.
No training was provided to colleges. Basically, I was the only person in my team that had previous experience with Siebel, and counting with me, Brazil office only had 3 people experienced with it. When I joined the company I did find information about an "excellence group" of Siebel professionals, which objectives were to provide solutions outside of the box, fixing deficiencies whenever they could. Given the last updated information I got, they were long gone before I joined.
So, I did realize about that time that I would need to move from Siebel ASAP. It didn't take six months to my manager to ask me starting (self-) studying other products from Oracle because "knowing Siebel was cool, but not enough anymore". But I would still need to provide help whenever it was required, usually when the system was already so neglected that the shit already hit the fan.
My strategy from there was to study Oracle products only enough to be able to handle day to day activities. On my own time, I did engaged a lot of self-study and training with open source systems, specially those related to DevOps. Today I see that I took the right decision, specially because I was laid off Oracle in 2016 to a (Brazilian) market that was moving out from Oracle products to other solutions, specially those from open source community.

How is Siebel nowadays in Brazil?

After Oracle, I didn't see the market improving for Siebel: it only got worst.
Some of my previous colleges left Brazil to work with Siebel abroad for two reasons:
  1. the country economy/security is a wreck
  2. the CRM market here was getting narrow by day.
CRM market in Brazil was never mature: even after many years of projects and investments, most companies were not getting value from Siebel basically because they don't have a CRM strategy.
If a company treats Siebel only as an application to take care of operational processes, well, it's losing money basically. I do know companies here in Brazil that didn't use their own data collected with Siebel for tactical/strategic planning and/or have several different CRM products running at the same time. Yes, "company wide single view of customer" my ass.
Most companies moved from Siebel to Salesforce and I honestly don't know how successful those projects were. What I do know is if your company is not making this move yet, you're in trouble. Siebel architecture is showing it's age already but no real investments are being made. There is no formal training from Oracle in Brazil for years already (and online training is very expensive). Most companies that are still using Siebel here are from the Telecom market and I must say those companies still have the worst evaluations from Brazilians customers in terms of complaints and that also looks like a complete lack of CRM strategy to me.
So, I'm guessing you got the idea. If you didn't and is still working with Siebel, allow me to be more direct: you're getting more expensive by the day to your company to maintain a system that might be seen as a operational-only solution.

Conclusion

Siebel is dead for me. I don't see any way for me going back to work with it, specially given the situation in Brazil. About my open source projects, there is absolute no reason to keep investing time and effort in them: collaboration from Siebel community was always scarce (but I did face bigotry now and then) and I have more interesting problems to keep solving. Time to move on.