Oracle and Siebel are merging to become the biggest front-office packaged application provider with a steady focus on meeting customer needs. The huge effort to address the requirements of 16,000 customers and over four million deployed end users doesn't faze Ed Abbo, formerly Siebel's vice president of development and now in charge of Oracle's Customer Relations Management (CRM) development team. One reason is that Oracle has a sound product strategy called protect, extend and evolve. This strategy enables customers to protect the investments they have in existing Oracle applications, extend them with innovative Oracle Fusion-based features, and ultimately evolve to the next-generation applications. Abbo is very excited about the doubling of the CRM-application capacity with the combination of Oracle and Siebel CRM development teams. More developers translate to more people dedicated to listening to customers and creating the best CRM applications in the marketplace. Future plans in the next six months call for development teams to deliver integrations of Oracle and Siebel products. Teams are also integrating Siebel CRM OnDemand with JD Edwards, Oracle, and PeopleSoft products.

As Published In May 2006

A Perfect Match
By Margaret Lindquist

Customers are the true beneficiaries of the Oracle and Siebel union.

With 12 years at Siebel and, prior to that, 7 years at Oracle, Ed Abbo knows both companies intimately and understands how to succeed in either environment. "Over the past three or four years, I've been running the technology office and development for Siebel," Abbo explains. "I started off in the engineering organization, ran Siebel's technical field organization for a number of years, and then started up and ran the industry applications organization, when we launched CRM [customer relationship management] applications specific to industries such as financial services, consumer goods, pharmaceuticals, high technology, automotive, energy, public sector, and communications." Abbo's familiarity with the business applications ecosystem is so complete that the thought of the approximately 16,000 customers and more than 4 million deployed end users—making the combined companies by far the largest front-office packaged application provider—doesn't faze him.

Oracle's strategy—called protect, extend, and evolve—allows customers to protect the investments that they have made in Oracle applications, extend them with new Oracle Fusion-based capabilities, and finally evolve to the next-generation applications when it makes business sense for them to do so. "The key message is that the product strategy is sound, and it takes into account what customers are doing today—what their plans are in the medium term as well as the long term. The timing is also excellent, since both Siebel and Oracle are in the process of building next-generation applications," Abbo emphasizes.

One of the things that Abbo, formerly Siebel's senior vice president of development and now in charge of Oracle's CRM development team under Oracle Senior Vice President of Applications Development John Wookey, is clearly most excited about is the doubling of the CRM application-development capacity with the merger of the Siebel and Oracle CRM development teams. More developers means more people committed to innovating, listening to customers, and creating the best CRM products in the marketplace.

After Oracle and Siebel announced the agreement to combine their businesses, both companies' development teams began the process of product integration planning. The teams began the planning and analysis of the product sets, the technology underpinnings provided by Oracle's database and middleware, and identified the integration points between the CRM and enterprise resource planning (ERP) products and the technology backbone. "Because of this planning," says Abbo, "we were ready to go in March when the two teams could begin hands-on work."

During the next 12 months, the development teams plan to continue working on integrating Siebel and Oracle products to support end-to-end processes such as the opportunity-to-cash processes. In addition, the teams are planning to integrate the Siebel CRM OnDemand hosted offering with the Oracle, PeopleSoft, and JD Edwards products. Siebel products provide customers with unrivaled deployment flexibility; the same functionality is available as a hosted service or on-premise software.

Getting To Oracle Fusion

More Resources Oracle User Groups: Provide feedback on the development path of Oracle Fusion. Visit www.iouc.org to find the user group that most closely meets your needs. Welcome Guide: Learn about the Oracle services available to you as a new Oracle customer at oracle.com/siebel/welcome_guide.pdf. Oracle Fusion: Get answers to your questions about Oracle Fusion and the path ahead for business application users at oracle.com/applications/fusion.html. Oracle's Largest Show: Make plans now to attend Oracle OpenWorld, the largest Oracle-focused show in the world, to learn up-to-the-minute information about the technology and software that can help your business succeed. The show is scheduled for October 22-26, in San Francisco. Find out more at oracle.com/openworld.

Oracle Fusion, Oracle's vision for next-generation enterprise technologies, applications, and services that will revolutionize business, is a familiar concept to Abbo. "Both Oracle and Siebel were already working on next-generation products at the time of the merger, and Oracle Fusion will allow us to deliver the next generation of CRM applications to the marketplace. It's very much in line with where Siebel was headed with our customer-adaptive applications. That is the ability for businesses to define very specific objectives for their interactions with their customers, model those in information technology, and drive their sales, service, and marketing organizations to deliver on those business objectives. Then, finally, businesses should be able to measure and monitor the effectiveness of the processes that they're implementing using embedded analytics applications," says Abbo.

Even better, the combination of the two companies is allowing Siebel CRM products to take real advantage of the Oracle technology stack in addition to other standards-based platforms.

Taking Care of Industries

Oracle has shown a commitment to industries by making sure the company, as well as its partners, is addressing the major industry-influenced technology challenges of its customers. The coming together of Oracle and Siebel is only further driving progress toward realizing that goal, especially with the focus that Siebel has had for years on core industries such as financial services (including insurance and banking), retail, manufacturing, and others. "We're bringing to the table deeper and broader industry-specific capabilities," says Abbo. "For example, in the financial services industries, we are enabling our CRM front-office solution to plug into a core banking system to help provide a complete end-to-end solution to the marketplace."

There are other examples—the Siebel applications offer 23 industry-specific versions and more than 100 industry-specific solution sets that enable streamlined business processes for numerous industries. "Our development team has worked very closely with customers in specific industries, and that has given us some great domain knowledge," says Abbo. "That's a huge benefit we bring to Oracle."

Robust Technology Platform

For More Information VISIT Oracle's Welcome Siebel site

What Oracle offers is just as exciting. The Oracle technology stack, including Oracle Fusion Middleware (a portfolio of industry-leading, standards-based, and customer-proven software products that spans a range of tools and services including Java Platform, Enterprise Edition, and developer tools, integration services, business intelligence, collaboration, and content management) and Oracle Database, comprise a robust technology platform that is critical for delivering the kind of benefits that business applications users require. In addition, the comprehensive business analytics, the industry-leading capabilities for retail, financial services, and other areas, and the ease of integration promised by the combined development teams are huge benefits for all customers.

"Our technology teams at Siebel have been working very closely with the Oracle technology teams to look at the new capabilities we want to take advantage of and to deliver the most scalable, high-performance, and reliable applications to our customers," emphasizes Abbo. "As we move to plan our next generation of Oracle Fusion CRM capabilities, we now can work a lot more closely with the Oracle server technology teams to take advantage of capabilities in the database and the application server."

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