Monday, November 12, 2018

The awesome EAI Transaction Service

 

After I finally got to leave the ‘Siebel ecosystem’, I had to return as that was indeed my core competency. And because there are places were Siebel is still awesome.

Like, the concept of a Webservice transaction in Siebel session. I am yet to see other systems implement it.

Siebel provides an awesome business service called ‘EAI Transaction Service’.  It has two methods , BeginTransaction, and EndTransaction. Like the name denotes, you mark the beginning of the your webservice transaction , and then proceed to use ‘EAI Siebel Adapter’ to make your updates, and finally commit everyting with the EndTransaction method.

Nothing gets committed to the system until you End the transaction successfully.

On commit, the last updated date and time on the objects is correctly preserved.

Now, the truly awesome thing. Although the documentation mentions use of Siebel EAI services, any update can be done in the transaction, and they all will be treated the same way.

It works for scripting !

It works of Workflow updates as well.

So if you use a script to update a record, that update also will be commited only if the EndTransaction method is invoked successfully.

 

Otherwise, everything gets rolled back.

In other words, you don’t have to be doing EAI work in Siebel to use this BS. You can use it wherever you need to rollback changes in case something does not work out well. Doc ID 1293943.1

 

 

If only we could rollback our own mistakes in life like that .

Thursday, October 25, 2018

Hard sell

 

Been hearing some stories about Oracle's power plays here in Australia. It seems they are strong arming existing customers to force them to move directly into their cloud offerings.

And it is not even cheap. Instead of a direct upgrade of any on-premise siebel installation, they are trying to sell my current client their CX cloud offering. With a total cost of 10 million over 5 years ! 4 million per annum for CX cloud !


This is a hard sell. Specially looking at other alternatives in the market.

So it was no surprise there, when we unanimously threw that option out of the window.


So now, back to  Siebel On-Premise for now.

 

Thursday, August 23, 2018

xmlstarlet & xidel, xml parsing from the command line

 

For xml parsing from the command line, xmlstartlet and xidel require the ‘-‘ switch at the end to read from stdin. This has to be used during piping

 

curl http://gist.bbldtl.int:9000/ema/HUBQ1\?page\=log\&message_id\=52285748 | xidel -e '//pre' -   

image

 

 

Or:

curl http://gist.bbldtl.int:9000/ema/HUBQ1\?page\=log\&message_id\=52285748 | xmllint --format --xpath '//pre' - 

 

image

xidel removes the enclosing tags by default. So that’s better.

Saturday, August 4, 2018

SAP back with C/4 HANA


SAP has overhauled its CRM offering, launching a suite of applications under the banner C/4HANA, as the German biz best known for ERP aims to take on Salesforce.
Speaking today at SAP’s annual gabfest, Sapphire Now, chief executive Bill McDermott touted the move as a huge step change for SAP that would modernise CRM by focusing not on sales but the consumer.
The firm is aiming to use its strong position in the back-office market to convince users to also adopt its front-office, CRM, products.
It is offering full integration with ERP suite S/4HANA, as well as various other bells and whistles, such as a new data management suite for full control of highly distributed data, which was also launched today.
McDermott said that users were tired of “legacy CRM” and were unhappy with the customer experience offered by existing vendors.
He described the change as being “from a 360 degree view of sales automation, where some companies focus, to a 360 degree view of the actual customer.”
This is central to what the firm is pushing when it talks about C/4HANA: their system is based on the consumer, when existing offerings focus on sales.
Alex Atzberger, president of SAP Customer Experience, said during the keynote session that customers are increasingly in charge of defining their relationships with companies.
“They don’t think about B2B and B2C, they think about ‘Me2b’,” he said, arguing that companies need to recognise that consumers are gaining the power to define brands, and will “rebel against being treated like sales opportunities.”
The CRM suite was heavily hinted at during the firm’s Q1 earnings call, when McDermott said SAP was going to “rebrand the whole CRM category.”
In a press and analysts session today, McDermott threw more shots across the bows, saying of SAP’s competitors: “We have a new idea, a better idea - and the better idea always wins.”
He added: “We will not waiver, we will not bend until we finally take over the CRM marketplace.”
Although he didn’t mention Salesforce by name, he didn’t have to: the firm has dominated the CRM market for years, with SAP ranked second, followed by Oracle and then Microsoft, Adobe and others.
In 2017, Gartner put Salesforce with an 18.8 per cent market share, and was growing faster than the market rate, while SAP had 8.5 per cent worldwide share and grew slightly slower.
And the pressure is on SAP to catch up - Gartner analyst Ed Thompson said the CRM market is expected to reach more than $75bn by end of 2022, compared with $44nn for ERP, meaning that SAP has to do well in CRM - but it still has more to do.
"It will take more than just launching C4/HANA to close the gap," he said. "They’ll need to find a way to appeal to those who are not existing SAP customers for CRM, widen their ecosystem of ISV and consulting partners, and make ground in the industries they haven’t traditionally sold CRM to."
SAP's launch comes after a series of CRM acquisitions made by the firm, including one announced today, of Swiss field service management biz Coresystems, which provides real-time scheduling for customer service requests.
Other recent acquisitions include a $2.4bn deal to buy sales performance management firm CallidusCloud and a $350m buy of customer identity management biz Gigya, while it acquired ecommerce plaform Hybris for $1.4bn in 2013.
These have been built into the C/4HANA suite as SAP Sales Cloud, SAP Customer Data Cloud, SAP Marketing Cloud, SAP Service Cloud and SAP Commerce Cloud.
Thompson said that bringing these products under one brand, as C/4HANA, was a good move to consolidate SAP's architectures and "remove confusing sub-brands" so it had one roadmap in the CRM market.
"But it will require a quick follow up with details on architecture and roadmap to back up the strategy, and it doesn’t yet address the issue of how this will encourage a CRM ecosystem of partners and facilitate increased innovation," he added.
The decision to rebrand its CRM offering as an end-to-end service that integrates with SAP’s ERP offerings is part of wider moves to get customers back on side.
During 2017, the firm’s crackdown on indirect access saw customers with software that connected to data stored on SAP systems - even indirectly - worried they would be hit with a high cost sueball.
This became more of an issue in recent years due to the number of other systems accessing SAP’s increased rapidly - and indeed, Salesforce was among that number.
Although SAP recently overhauled its licensing rules, presumably the firm will be happy to ease customers’ minds by suggesting they just use SAP’s new CRM suite instead. 



Wednesday, January 24, 2018

Siebel IP 18 - 2018 SOD

Oracle is going ahead and staying with Siebel. For now. They have just released the statement of direction for IP 2018.

At a high level the document describes features and improvements:

  • Business agility - Siebel Composer enhancements for Web Tools and Parallel Development.
  • Enhanced deployment and migration options.
  • High Availability architecture with clustering support for the new Gateway
  • Integration improvement via enhancements to the REST API
  • Customer experience improvements with Open UI, including intuitive Dashboards
  • Industry innovations - Product Configurator, cross-Industry User Dashboards, Oracle Policy Automation, Real Time Scheduler and Siebel UCM improvements.
  • Autonomous CRM - Business Process Discoverer, Automated iHelp and Test Automation improvements

Access the Statement of Direction:

Innovation Pack 2018 (18.0) for Siebel CRM Statement of Direction / Planned Features (Doc ID 2328111.1)