Staying current on top of Oracle’s Siebel applications latest release is always the right move to take advantage of its news features, functionalities and enhancements. It also helps businesses to stay in line with oracle’s product life-cycle strategy to avoid any risks of being unsupported and security vulnerabilities.
Key Benefits
Oracle has introduced continuous release model where deployment has shifted from annual big bang upgrades to more incremental monthly updates. Customers can quickly adopt new features and stay current with latest releases.
The Oracle’s Siebel CRM team has recently released major innovations to address pain-points and dramatically improve application maintenance and agility. BRT is quick to adapt to such new releases from Oracle and help our clients to upgrade to latest versions.
With the latest release Oracle is providing:
- Unlimited support on the key releases
- Security and Bug fixes as needed
- Browser certifications
- High Availability
- No charges for new features, e.g. Task based UI, Business rules, Application Deployment Manager.
Siebel CRM Upgrades in the past:
You may have seen Siebel upgrade taking months and months, starving the business from focusing from other priorities with Siebel. This often means Siebel upgrades are pushed back, delaying introducing new Siebel features, capability, and introducing risks to security and stability.
Background:
Client is an International group based out of UAE the largest manufacture and market a well-integrated range of mass market food products, related derivatives, intermediates and services. Client had requirement to upgrade the Siebel CRM and Database to latest version which was part of their digital transformation program.
Challenges:
Client had multiple environments i.e. Dev, QA and Prod. Upgrade has to be carried out in all the environments and siebel was heavily customized, the complete process of upgrade was quite challenging task. The database size was over 1.5 TB on the production. Oracle Business Intelligence (BI) publisher also as to be upgraded to support the CRM and DB upgrades. The parallel environment OR pre-prod was not an available option and production upgrade on the same VM was the most challenging task.
Success story:
The applications and DB servers were upgraded to latest versions as given below.
- Oracle DB upgraded from 12c to 19c
- Oracle Siebel CRM upgraded from IP 16 to IP 22.5
- Oracle BIP server upgraded from 11G to 12c
This was achieved with minimized risk and without disruption the existing business process. The upgrade was planned on the same Prod server, where the downtime was inevitable. BRT has upgraded the DB and Applications with minimum downtime, which customer has provided to us. The overall downtime was less than 48 hours for the process to complete.
Additionally, with the automated testing feature in Siebel, regression tests can be executed very quickly removing a key blocker to upgrade efficiency. Once the development & QA upgrade is finished, we prepared an upgrade optimisation straight away, even if there are functional issues that need to be fixed they will not be a blocker for the optimisation and rehearsal of the upgrade scripts. Critically, we planned sufficient time in the project plan to baseline the performance of the upgrade.
