In 1993 Thomas Siebel and Patricia House founded Siebel
Systems, Inc.
Forward 20 years and here we are:
- Siebel CRM:
o Oracle's roadmap for Siebel CRM is already announced.
o More than 3.000 organizations use Siebel CRM.
- Siebel Analytics (now known as OBIEE) is considered a
reference within Business Intelligence products, as Oracle's standard Business
Intelligence product.
Within IT industry, that means for me: not so small
revolution.
In 2004 began my particular Siebel
journey thanks to Deloitte and until now I have worked closely with Siebel
products. Currently I still struggle to get the concepts that are incorporated
into each Siebel releases (in other words: within Siebel, new technologies are
being continuously improved).
So what makes Siebel CRM or Siebel
Analytics so successful should be considered exhaustive, anyway let me explain
the conceptual overview of what really fascinated me.
1.
Business logic layer
Siebel CRM is a consistent way to record and Siebel
Analytics is a consistent way to provide information, both products include
predefined modules such as Energy, Public Sector, Loyalty, Order Management and
so on. Both products separate each layer:
- Physical layer: Contain the definition of the relational
database.
- Business logic layer: Contain the abstraction layer of
the business.
- Presentation layer: Contain the end user interface.
I was so impressed when I find out the abstraction of the Business logic
layer. To be concrete, Business entities are customized within Business logic
layer. In this way, Siebel provides several resources (such as the usage of
user-properties based on classes or the incorporation of additional code into
Business Component events) to enable particular customer requirements that predefined
entities doesn’t include.
2. Operational vs
Analytical:
At high level, in this point there are two main concepts involved: Operational
environment and Analytical
environment.
In this scenario, the analytical environment builds
consolidated information from more than one source.
On that basis, I was really fascinated as soon as I
realized that depending on physical layer configuration, Siebel analytics (OBIEE)
is able to provide not only Analytical
dashboards (operate in data collected over time, insights into historical data), but also Operational dashboards (operate
in real-time, insights into current performance).
To sum up: It’s an asset that the Analytical environment contains
Analytical and Operational dashboards, depend on the purpose of the dashboard.
In order to be efficient, effective and also identify issues before they become
problems.
Finally, let me say that I really think that a way to evolves is
incorporate into Siebel Analytics (OBIEE) statistical modules, conceptual
functionalities that nowadays provide software such as SPSS, for me currently
OBIEE and IBM SPSS are complementary (have an eye to: Can't see forest for the trees ).
Best wishes.
Joan Martí Peraire.
(Industrial Engineer)