Business agility is ability of a product to quickly respond to change. Once a leader in CRM space, Siebel has been losing against cloud based CRM products owing to lack of agility.
What is stopping Siebel from being an agile application? One
reason is that even for a minor configuration changes, Siebel needs downtime,
which has been a pain point for Siebel developer and business users.
The upcoming release of Siebel IP2017 showcases impressive
and most awaited features, such as Agile, Mobility, Cloud-ready, IoT, Machine
Learning, AI-driven business and Autonomous CRM.
Of these features, in my blog, I would like to focus Siebel
Composer for development in agile mode, Workspace for real-time deployment and
In-built Test Automation for testing in automated mode.
Siebel Roadmap IP2017 - Business Agility
1. Siebel
Composer
Siebel Composer is a Web Based IDE, Visual, Guided for Siebel
customization. It support run-time configuration. It simplifies application
development via a WYSIWYG (What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get) visual interface.
'Composer' terminology is not new,
we have been hearing it for last two years. It was introduced in IP15.5, but
prior releases have presented developer-preview, and after two years in
innovating and maturing, it will be production-ready in IP 2017.
To facilitate on-the fly change, configuration metadata has
been moved from a file-based store (SRF) to the Siebel CRM database. Now the
configuration changes for repository object supported by Composer will be
published directly to server database, so no more SRF compilation required, and
hence zero-downtime mission has been accomplished.
Composer feature enables developer to configure Siebel from
anywhere via a browser, which is in-synch with the latest cloud based
application development.
2. Workspace: Parallel Development
Workspace manages the parallel, isolated, multi-release
development and complete governance of Siebel CRM. Workspace is key building
block for web composer.
At present Siebel Tools is based on check-in/check-out, object locking process for Siebel configuration, which limits two developers to work on same repository object at a time. With introduction of Workspace, check-in/check-out, local database setup, DB extract, DB initialization all this time consuming process will become a history. This enables quick on-boarding of developer and parallel development
Developers work in isolation, in their private sandbox for
editing, compiling configuration changes, testing and delivering to parent
workspace. Only user with workspace administrator rights can deliver the
changes to MAIN workspace.
3. In-built
Automated Testing Suite
Agile development requires regression test automation.
Therefore there is a huge dependency on third party application testing suite
to manage test cases and test plans.
In upcoming release IP2017, Siebel CRM is integrated with an
end-to-end automation framework testing tool, and Oracle claims it will reduce
70% effort in testing as compared to third party testing tool integration.
The upcoming improvements in Siebel inspire confidence for
the customers to continue leveraging their existing Siebel investments and use
the rich/deep CRM capabilities in Siebel.