siebelobserver

Anderson Aquino Joins Rimini Street

Third party support provider Rimini Street has hired Anderson Aquino to manage its business in Brazil.  

Aquino has 24 years experience in the IT industry having spent 15 years helping customers implement SAP enterprise software across South America, including Brazil, Bolivia, Argentina, Paraguay, Peru, Chile and Colombia, as well as Germany, Mexico and the U.S. Aquino’s prior roles include Brazilian country manager responsibility for Wipro and Everis, and service delivery responsibilities including project management implementations, upgrades, localizations and system operations.

"I am excited to help the Brazilian market benefit from Rimini Street," said Aquino. He is based in San Palo and can be reached at aaquino@riministreet.com.

 

Oracle BI Apps Changes

In his Siebel Essentials blog, Alexander Hansal describes how the changes in release 11.1.1.7.1 of Oracle Business Intelligence Applications (OBI). He writes:

"The arrival of the latest version has ignited quite a buzz (and a bit of confusion) in the OBI community."

Oracle BI Apps 11.1.1.7.1 and Why Fusion is More than just Applications

The Future of Siebel

Editor's Note: This piece on the Future of Siebel first appeared in Alexander Hansal's influential blog Siebel Essentials a must read for anyone with an interest in Siebel, OBIEE and analytics and Fusion.

***

All good things must come to an end. The fact that there must be a last cookie in the jar, a last day of vacation, a last Iron Man movie is as certain as it is inevitable. Even our own sun will disintegrate in a hot helium flash someday. Since this is not predicted to happen for another 7 billion years, I am not very worried about the effect it will have on my career as a ski instructor (although it would have a big impact if it happened during ski season).

Similar to these other good things coming to an end we all know the clock will run out for Siebel technology at some point. Like cookies, vacations, and suns; Siebel too will eventually disappear. Will the demise of Siebel impact your career? The simple answer is only if you decide to let it change the course your career. For like the sun, and unlike cookies, the end of Siebel is not likely to happen soon enough to force you to abandon your skills unless that is your choice. To understand the future of Siebel we must begin with the last foreseeable point and work backwards and begin with the end in mind.

Someday, and I predict a day very far in the future (so far in fact that I doubt anyone reading this now will be alive to see it) the very last instance of Oracle Siebel will be turned off.   Although some backup tapes with executable code will still slowly be disintegrating in tape vaults, Oracle Siebel technology will, for all intents and purposes, be consigned to the rubbish heap of history along with the stone axe, the chariot, the trebuchet and all the other tools man has invented to make life easier. Siebel technology could be build into interplanetary spaceships that  carry CRM to the far ends of the galaxy, but the end of Oracle Siebel will still happen. Although it is likely to go unnoticed, the stopping of the last instance will also mark the end of the labor of tens of thousands of individuals who devoted millions and millions of man hours which is poignant.

Before the last instance is turned off, all the other instances must be turned off. The last support call must be answered, the last maintenance release must be installed, the last enhancement made, the last update made available, the last support contract signed, the last new installation, the last Siebel job posting, the last new licence sold, the last appearance of Oracle Siebel on a product roadmap.

Since Oracle's current roadmap for Siebel extends until 2020 it is safe to say that if you are 40 years old and you retire at 65, Siebel will still be in use in 2038. There are three reason why I am confident in making this prediction, COBOL, the mainframe, and current job market.

• 50 years after it was first developed and 40 years after it was first declared obsolete the demand for people with COBOL skills has continued to grow and has never been greater. 
• IBM now sells more mainframes (by dollar value) now than it did in 1980. Year after year those companies that standardized on mainframes have found it more cost effective to continue to run than replace them with newer architectures.
• The demand for people with Siebel skills continues to grow as more people leave the field than are entering it.

Although you might have to change the company you are working for, or the location where you work,  or way you go about your work, if you choose you can do Siebel work for the rest of your career.

Take this Poll On the Future of Siebel

This year marks the 20th anniversary of the founding of Siebel Systems. After being acquired by Oracle in 2005, Siebel CRM and the successor of Siebel Analytics, Oracle Business Intelligence, are still flagship products. Thousands of IT professionals worldwide make a living from these two systems.

Siebel CRM itself has been on the market for 17 years, and in the Siebel community there is much excitement about Oracle's commitment to strengthen the product's position, for example by delivering the Open UI framework. At the same time, many people wonder how many years Siebel has left.

Always with our fingers on the pulse of the Siebel community, we - a group of dedicated Siebel bloggers* - are working together to conduct a poll to find out public opinion on that question.

If you want to cast your vote on the poll, you can do it right here. Use this link to access the poll in a separate window or on a mobile device.

*The following blogs are hosting this poll:
(in alphabetical order)

CRM Conundrum
Impossible Siebel
On Demand Education
Siebel Essentials
Siebel Tech Blog
Siebel Unleashed
Wentari

Oracle Invests in Digital Medicine

Oracle Corporation (Nasdaq: ORCL) has made a minority investment in Proteus Digital Health, a medical devices company that has developed ingestible and wearable sensors that are marketed in the United States and Europe. Proteus is working to create a new category of products called Digital Medicines.

In these products, pharmaceuticals will include ingestible sensor. Once swallowed the sensor will communicate with a wearable sensor on the skin. The wearable sensor also captures the body’s physiologic responses and behaviors, and sends the digital health information to a mobile application and from there into the cloud. The Proteus system is designed to deliver information about medication ingestion, dose timing and associated physiologic response of patients, including heart rate, activity, rest, and skin temperature.

The two companies are planning to integrate Proteus’ ingestible sensor with Oracle’s Siebel Clinical Trial Management System, Oracle Health Sciences InForm, Oracle Life Sciences Data Hub and the Oracle Health Sciences Cloud.

This is a smart investment on the part of Oracle. The application in clinical trials are evident, but further down the road digital medicine could have an impact on big data and even the cloud. If just many, not even most people in the developed world started ingesting sensors to keep track of their health the amount of data collected would be staggering, Where would all that information be kept? In Oracle databases and on the the Oracle Health Sciences Cloud.

Andrew Powell Joins Rimini Street

Third party support provider Rimini Street has hired Andrew Powell to manage its Asia-Pacific business.  Powell has over 15  years industry experience, first as a general manager with NTT DATA Business Solutions and before that as regional vice president at Sabre Airline Solutions based in Singapore. "There is exceptional demand for the benefits of third-party support in the Asia-Pacific region," said Powell. He is based in Australia and can be reached at apowell@riministreet.com.

The very best of Tom Siebel - a memoir

By Mei Lin Fung

Editor's Note: Mei Lin Fung's career as a organizer, entrepreneur, and author has spanned the non-profit, technology, and finance worlds. Tom Siebel hired her at Oracle to implement his initial vision of an enterprise CRM system. She has been kind enough to share with us that experience:

*****

Tom Siebel interviewed me for a job working for him in August 1988. A headhunter set up the interview. Apparently he had interviewed many people and none fit the bill for what he wanted in a Division Controller for the Direct Marketing Division. Well that's because he expected a weird combination of skills. Finance, Marketing, Sales, Software, Good people skills and a propensity for risk-taking.

It was a pivotal hour in my life to interview with him. He talked about what he wanted to do: REALLY make it possible for technology to transform sales and marketing. A vision of the future where technology could support the prima donnas of sales in a way that was completely supportive of the quirks of the individual salesperson.

My most recent work at Intel up to that point had been as the alpha user for the Intel Distribution Marketing System - which involved setting up the Intel methodology of forecasting for distribution sales out and bookings. Stagger charts, Actuals vs Forecast variance analysis, rigorous accountability for making projections and tying them to what actually happened.

Tom's boss was head of US Sales, Gary Kennedy who had been an ex-Intel guy. In a way, it was a marriage made in heaven, I was perfectly matched to what he needed. What he wanted to do was make into reality what he had been selling to Oracle customers: The ability of the relational database to truly transform business practice in sales and marketing to support customers in a way they had never before experienced or imagined.

When he told me his vision, I could see that it involved taking what I had just done at Intel and applying it to direct B2B sales - an extraordinary exciting vision.

That was the beginning of the best working experience I ever had, the two years working for Tom Siebel - and the skunkworks project that Kevin Kraemer and I kicked off in September 1988. Oracle MIS told Tom it was impossible, fergedaboutit.

Tom set me, his Division Controller and Kevin Kraemer, the top pre-sales technical guy in the group on moonlighting to create the first integrated sales and marketing application, OASIS, which was the genesis of the CRM industry.

Direct Marketing Division spawned two billionaires so far: Tom Siebel and Vinny Smith, and transformed software sales and marketing, making telemarketing and telesales the most critical sales function for all software companies. People who worked for DMD - Direct Marketing Division and who had used OASIS - the Oracle Automated Sales Information System, were recruited by software companies in order to replicate the "Oracle Sales Model". The next potential billionaire of course is Marc Benioff who took over from Tom when he left Oracle.

*****

This content was originally posted on the Global Connections, Eclectic Selections blog on May 20, 2006. This article has also been published in Alexander Hansal's Siebel Essentials , a must read source for anyone working with Oracle Siebel technology.

Siebel Essentials Celebrates 600th Posting

Over the past 5 years Alexander Hansal's blog Siebel Essentials has become a must read for anyone in the Siebel community. Recently he celebrated his 600th post. He writes:

"Looking back, I see a very rewarding time. I am humbled by the impression of being accepted as an authority on Siebel CRM and other Oracle products by the online community. Thanks to all dear readers (of both blog and books) for the great support and informative discussions over the years."

You can read more at 600 Posts - Siebel Essentials Then, Now and in the Future.

BioPharm Host to Moving Siebel to the Cloud Webinar

Param Singh, vice president of clinical trial management solutions at BioPharm will offer a webinar "Cloud-based vs. On-site CTMS: Which is Right for Your Organization?" on June 20th.

Accenture Launches a New Center of Excellence

Accenture launched a new Center of Excellence for Oracle Engineered Systems which will help enable faster and more cost-effective implementation of Oracle solutions for Accenture's clients. The virtual center is dedicated to accelerating the development, delivery and commercialization of business solutions based on Oracle’s Engineered Systems, including Oracle Exadata Database Machine, Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud and Oracle Exalytics In-Memory Machine. All of this will be provided to clients through a flexible, elastic cloud platform enabled by Oracle’s cloud technologies.