The Siebel Roadmap session at this year's Oracle OpenWorld conference was still a hot ticket - here is what we heard about.

Although the theme of the week was undoubtedly the Oracle Cloud platform developments and strategy, there were still a large number of sessions covering the latest news and developments around the Siebel platform - showing that Siebel is far from dead and Oracle's continued investment can be seen from this slide (we know how many of you like to see this timeline extending out each year!!):

Fig. 1: A timeline showing the current Siebel roadmap - to 2022 and beyond!

Our Highlights

Here were the key points from the Siebel roadmap session:

• 8.1.x/8.2.x Support: Oracle's premier support has been pushed out until 2017 and extended support until 2020.
• Bi-directional sync between Siebel and Oracle Sales Cloud coming in 2015
• Accelerators will be available for bi-directional sync between Siebel and Oracle Service Cloud
• Great emphasis on streamlining and simplification of IRM
• Siebel Tools on the web! (see below)
• Engineering tests running Siebel on Oracle 12c database with In-Memory option enabled saw HUGE performance gains
• Lots of Open UI innovation focussed on simple, clean, cross-device user interfaces

Unsurprisingly the message was continued that Oracle are building out Siebel extensions to the Oracle CX Cloud (this was being discussed at last year's OpenWorld roadmap session:

Fig. 2: Oracle's positioning of Siebel on-premise with the CX Cloud Applications

Beyond the talk of extending Siebel with Oracle's Marketing Cloud, Service Cloud or Social Cloud applications to protect historical investment in the core Siebel product, there was plenty to see by way of developments to the Siebel Open UI interface shipping with Siebel these days. The main focus on Open UI in IP2014 was with persona-driven user interfaces developed in conjunction with a UX Design agency. Certainly there were lots of screen shots showing what we can expect to see towards the end of 2014 with context sensitive navigation, collapsible content menus and cross-device support with elements of Responsive Web Design now built into the framework.

Runtime Configuration - No more srf!

So we couldn't finish this post without letting you know about the latest announcements with regard to the move away from the Siebel Tools developer client:

Fig. 3: Siebel web-based Integrated Development Environment - coming soon...

Oracle have been re-imagining Siebel Tools - and the result looks like being a role-based Integrated Development Environment (IDE) from the Developer through to the end-user. This will mean web-based metadata changes with no more srf and no more web templates. Once you start to think about the move away from local Siebel Tools developer clients to a web-based environment it started to become clear that this was no small piece of work - Oracle are now faced with building out a full multi-user development environment and concepts such as workspaces. The sneak previews of the currently ongoing development in this area certainly whetted the appetite for next year though - for this was IP2015 roadmap stuff and for now we'll just have to wait...

Learn More

Keep up to date with everything that we learned at OpenWorld 2014 via this blog, or follow us on twitter!

Boxfusion Consulting are a Specialised Oracle Siebel CRM Implementation Partner, with a particular expertise in the Open UI framework.

Why not contact us, or call us now on +44 203 2834315.