January 09, 2014

What does Google says about Siebel?

In recent weeks we have been reading many new articles across the web talking about Siebel's future. Initially it started with a community poll, and then couple of guest posts flared the discussion over blog-sphere, there were surveys  and conclusions done by well known authors: @lex and BruceDaley

 After some months Adam Honig warned consultants that Siebel is dead end there are many cloud services which are proving an alternative to enterprise installed Siebel application and recommended to switchover to other technologies. Bruce Daley however opposed the viewpoint, he was supported by Richard which pointed out few good things about Siebel. Both however could not completely ruled out the facts regarding the continuing loss of oracle business due to the cloud CRM systems. I recommend to read the discussion on this link.and link
 
Earlier during the year on other extreme @lex technical trainer from oracle recommended to learn Siebel technology even if it is the last day, It felt a bit of an emotional post. Everyone in Siebel developer community had same feelings.

Nothing actually changed my mind except the post from sugar crm sales team, they published and article showcasing selection of sugar crm as replacement of biggest Siebel call center implementation in IBM. Collectively all these forced me to do my own research.

I am not a veteran Siebel researcher like Bruce and don't have any data from the customers world wide. So I started with Google. Found couple of videos and interviews from Siebel product management found that everyone is defending Siebel(links to come).

Then I turned over to Google trends, and found a very interesting facts, In this post I am just sharing my understanding over these graphs. The first comparison I performed was of Siebel & Salesforce in which you can easily see that Salesforce is gaining the momentum and Siebel losing it.

Next Graph shows comparisons of all the leading customer relationship management applications.

They show easily that interest in Siebel is declining and Saleforce is becoming popular, this is also displayed in siebel/salesforce job search and interviews.

Next graphs shows the similarity of Siebel graph with the downfall of s60 over iOS and Android



Next I turned on to another Google tool : Google Adwords which tells how much other advertisers are bidding to rank their ads on google search terms.



One could easily see Siebel search terms have lower cost, and Salesforce is significantly higher than Siebel!

I appreciate the efforts of everyone who is promoting year 2014 as great year for Siebel, but stats doesn't seems to agree. I am strong believer of keeping the spirit and momentum high, but this had to be shared. 


-Jim

5 comments :

  1. Good post Jim. While there is no debate about the data, it can be interpreted in different ways. No question Salesforce has surpassed Siebel in popularity was well in the collective imagination, but to compare the two products side-by-side is a little like comparing a pickup truck with an off-road haul truck. While in theory the two do the same work, in practice they are designed to solve very different problems. You wouldn't take a Caterpillar 797F down to Home Depot to pick up some flowers and fertilizer for the garden; on the other hand its 400 ton capacity does come in very handy when you are mining Molybdenum. Salesforce is a great product and a great tool for solving the problems it was designed to solve. Siebel is great product for things like providing an on premise universal customer master for organizations with millions of customers like international Banks and large Telcos. My point is the advantages of Siebel for certain tasks has been overlooked and I predict 2014 may be the year when it is finally recognized that the product has a permanent place in many organization's computing infrastructure and will never be entirely replaced by Salesforce.

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    1. Agree with your thoughts Bruce, being a tech consultant I completely understand the capabilities and strengths of Siebel and also why siebel is the only solutions for certain implementations.

      however organisation due to wrong/invalid reasons jumps to cloud which infact impacts the business negatively. I have seen cloud implementations going terribly wrong, can't name those due to obvious reasons.

      I would like to see 2014 as renaissance of siebel and with this blog I would like to open some eyes to the cloud pitfalls.

      -jim

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    2. I agree with Jim and Bruce, Siebel will acquire a permanent place with regards to what it can do over other CRM. Having said that, the stoppage of any enhancements to keep pace with latest technology is what is ailing Siebel now. Open UI has more bugs than relevant business use. Isn't it time Siebel kept pace with the world? A decade ago, it was ahead of the world, look at it now.. I really pray Siebel lives for ever!

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  3. I will have to agree with you both on this. Indeed Siebel's extensive functionality eclipses thats of salesforce. I woulkd say Siebel is like microsoft word whereas salesforce is like Notepad.

    Salesforce is doing well because it fulfills a niche in the enterprise architecture and this niche was just waiting to be filled! In 25 years in IT i have never seen a product better designed than Siebel .. It should be a blueprint for other enterprise apps.

    Cloud is a big illusion and i know too many companies that have suffered going down SaaS route ... But some organizations just need to learn the hard-way

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