what's new in Siebel 8.0

Siebel 8.0 is the first major release since the Oracle takeover and is now imminent.

Oracle are planning a simultaneous launch of five different products (JD Edwards, E-Business, PeopleSoft and Siebel 8.0) on 31 January 2007.

Ed Abbo (VP CRM products) will be chairing the Siebel session and SearchCRM has an interesting (albeit low quality) interview podcast with Ed where he talks about new features in Siebel 8.0, CRM OnDemand and the impact of the Oracle takeover on Siebel’s development and strategy.

The Oracle Applications Users Group (OAUG) also has an excellent summary of the new functionality in Siebel 8.0.

IBM has published a useful whitepaper about tuning Siebel 8.0 on AIX 5.3. The paper includes benchmarks with different virtual memory page sizes and shows the benefits of simultaneous multi-threading. The paper also includes analysis of generic tuning features available in Siebel (connection pooling and threads per process).

The two key features that specifically interest me are the Siebel Diagnostic Console and the introduction of support for Linux (RedHat 4.0, SuSE 9.0).

The Siebel Diagnostic Console offers an Analytics style dashboard interface into the volumes of data produced by SARM.

Secondly, the number of Siebel customers choosing to deploy on Linux in the coming months will be interesting.

Another example of the closer integration between Siebel and Oracle is the recent announcement of a management pack for Oracle Enterprise Manager (OEM) in the recently released 10.2.0.3.

Oracle Application Management Pack for Siebel is a comprehensive solution for managing the configuration, performance, availability, and service level of Siebel CRM applications. It can be used to monitor the health of the servers and components, measure application response time, track configuration changes, and diagnose performance and execution problems.

This will be an invaluable tool for Oracle DBA’s (who may be unfamiliar with the Siebel application) to easily monitor a Siebel OLTP instance and identify performance problems more promptly.