Siebel-Sales Cloud Integration Announcements - The WHY?

Of all the Siebel announcements in the past few years in Oracle Open World, I cannot make sense of the integration-related stuff.

I am talking about slides like this.

Imagine this -

• You are a software creator with two products with highly overlapped functions
• You want your customers to move from Product A, a legacy product, to Product B, a ‘modern’ application

It is only natural that Product B will not launch with the full set of bells and whistles that make Product A so attractive. But you should start introspecting things if the status continues without big changes five to eight years of development.

Let’s keep that aside for a moment. Consider how customers will move from Product A to B.

Apparently not all people will jump with joy through the perils of software migration. You try to make things simpler by enabling -

• Seamless data migration from A to B
• Out-of-box integration of the two products for complex implementations that need an extended time to move over completely

But, would you continue to make this an all-new “innovative” announcement year after year? That too for the poor, neglected-for-long Product A?

Probably not - if you have smarter announcements in the queue.

For people who have landed here without any background:

• Product A = Siebel
• Product B = Oracle Sales Cloud

The software world is a changed place today.

Integration should be as simple as subscribing the service from the source. As a product creator, you create the APIs and sit back and watch as partners, users and developers find interesting ways to use the APIs.

Data should be importable by nothing more than point and click.

“Enterprise software” should no more be the abused term to reflect the high complexity of the implementation - data migration & integration included.

I am sure the behemoth software vendors get this - but they are just too big, too highly invested in the past to quickly move forward. And that will be their Achille’s heel.