What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas right?  Wrong!!  there were so many exciting announcements and customer success achievements at Oracle CloudWorld that we absolutely must share them with you all.

Firstly, it was great to be back at our flagship event with a Siebel CRM Customer Advisory Board (CAB) the day before kick-off. Fantastic to have our most influential and innovative customers and partners together to provide feedback on our strategy, in-flight innovations and share their own perspectives and challenges.

Following the CAB, we teamed up with the other Oracle CX apps and Industry councils at Flight Club in the Venetian for some darts. A fantastic event, the highlights and awesome check-outs are captured here.

CloudWorld was off to a great start.

 

Celebrating our Customers Success

The most important aspect of our event recap is to highlight our customers’ success and innovations. On behalf of the Siebel CRM team at Oracle we are incredibly proud to hear how innovative our customers are, how our new features can help to save costs and create new market opportunities.

TIM Brasil – Leonardo Capdeville, the CTIO, was a guest in Safra Catz’s keynote, detailing their strategy to move everything, including their mission-critical Siebel CRM application into the cloud. A bold strategy, born out of the pandemic to derive more economic value and agility – yet exactly what we would expect from one of the market leaders in the region.

As well as clearing out their entire data centre, they were able to reduce TCO in IT infrastructure costs by 30% whilst improving performance of their Siebel CRM application by 50%! Saving money and improving customer experience. This really does endorse our strategy that Siebel CRM runs best on Oracle and you will see incredible ROI by moving your deployment to OCI.

You can watch the TIM Brasil highlight in the replay here.

American Airlines, Vodafone, Izzi Telecom and Swisscom also shared their latest success with Siebel CRM and Oracle technologies:

American Airlines – run their Loyalty platform (the largest and oldest airline loyalty program worldwide) with Siebel CRM 23.8 as an Oracle Container Engine for Kubernetes (K8S) cluster on OCI and a 25 TB Oracle 19c database on Exadata Cloud Service. This extreme scale platform supports over 30 million multi-channel web services requests daily.

After reducing TCO from the initial move to OCI, the team at AA have achieved even greater efficiencies. A 76% reduction in the # of Compute by moving from VMs to K8S, 37% reduced compute spend with off-peak automated downscaling.

The move to OCI has also become a springboard for innovation, they have added OCI A.I. Services to use a Custom Text Classification Model to automatically categorize customer complaints. More A.I. capabilities have been introduced by moving OBIEE and BI Publisher reporting to Oracle Analytics Cloud.

A truly compelling case study and a great testament to the highly skilled team at AA!

Izzi Telecom – updated their stack with Siebel CRM 23.1 and Oracle 19c database running on OCI. They also moved other workloads into cloud such as billing and added Oracle Field Service capabilities. The new platform supports almost 7m customers, 500m service requests, over 100m orders, and 12m devices! They have seen immediate scalability, transaction effectiveness, improved real-time monitoring and faster time to market.

Swisscom – another extreme-scale Siebel CRM deployment, supporting 3k users, 120k SRs, 30k quotes/orders per day. At the heart of this platform is the shift adopting cloud infrastructure, but deployed on-premises. Swisscom have adopted the high-powered Private Cloud Appliance X9 platform directly attached to new Exadata X9M to support their customer channels.

PCA X9 brings services compatible with OCI to an on-premises implementation at rack scale, making workloads, user experience, tool sets and skills portable between private and public clouds. When pairing with Oracle Exadata this creates an ideal infrastructure for scalable, multi-tier applications. Another key initiative for Swisscom is sustainability and great to hear that they recently won an award for the most sustainable telecommunication company in the world! Fantastic achievement!

Vodafone – in addition to their extensive Siebel CRM deployment, they run a full range of OCI services in Vodafone data centers, maintaining data residency across 21 operating countries. They have set themselves objectives of enabling digital transformation and business flexibility while maintaining stable and performant systems.  Their guiding principles – avoiding big-bang transformations and establishing common evolution patterns across markets – have led them to leverage the cloud, and break the monolith through standard interfaces and new enabler capabilities. 

Do not miss our upcoming webinar on Monday 16 October where we will be providing a review of Oracle CloudWorld 2023 for Siebel CRM customers – including American Airlines presenting their superb session again! click here to register.

 

Generative AI

Larry Ellison’s keynote was as captivating as ever, as you’d expect Artificial intelligence (AI) and in particular – Generative A.I. was up front as the most prominent element of Oracle’s strategy for the future. Watch the Larry Ellison keynote: Oracle’s vision for the future

It’s clear that Oracle is ahead of the pack to ensure this revolutionary technology is to be easily consumed by our enterprise customers and partners. Oracle has a partnership with NVIDIA for specialised H100 GPUs, vital to power OCI compute instances necessary to train LLMs. Secondly, Oracle’s distributed cloud strategy is also different to other vendors, Oracle wants to bring the latest A.I. technology to our customers anywhere they want it.

In addition, developed in partnership with Cohere, which contributed LLMs, OCI Generative AI can be leveraged through APIs within the Oracle Fusion Cloud suites: Cloud Customer Experience (CX), Supply Chain Management (SCM), Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Human Capital Management (HCM), for example, functionality will enable users to:

  • Summarize Text
  • Generate copies
  • Chat
  • Adopt stylistic conversations
  • Classify text
  • Search across available data

Check out the Steve Miranda Apps keynote to find out more: Achieving lasting success with Oracle Fusion Applications and read this announcement here: Oracle injects AI into database, cloud infrastructure, and applications

 

More Choices with Oracle’s Distributed Cloud

OCI’s distributed cloud provides customers with the flexibility to choose where and how cloud services are delivered to meet their regulatory, performance, and other data residency needs.

Oracle’s strategy to bring the best services directly to our customers, including Generative A.I. services and advanced database and analytical solutions is great news for Siebel CRM customers.

Compute Cloud@Customer is the latest addition to Oracle’s distributed cloud portfolio in your data center. It’s a complete cloud platform that’s built, installed, owned, and operated by Oracle so you don’t need to integrate, test, patch, and secure multiple components or have huge capital expenses. It’s run the same way with compute services as in OCI with simple metering and globally consistent pricing – something you don’t get with other vendors. This means that if you don’t use all of the CPU cores, you don’t pay consumption on them and your costs go down. This is another great option for our Siebel CRM customers that need to remain on-premise.

Days before Oracle CloudWorld 2023, Oracle announced a new partnership deal with Microsoft, that the Oracle database service running on OCI would be available through Microsoft Azure. The partnership will encompass Oracle Autonomous Database, Oracle Real Application Clusters, and Oracle Exadata Database services.

Most Siebel CRM customers use Oracle or Microsoft platforms so this announcement is a match made in heaven! More choice and flexibility, complete interoperability between vendors and simplification to adopt the latest cloud technologies that will transform your Siebel CRM application deployment.

To find out more about the latest OCI innovations, watch the Clay Magouyrk keynote: Building the more intelligent future of cloud

 

Oracle Database gets more A.I. superpowers

Oracle is introducing AI vectors to Oracle Database 23c. The new AI Vector Search feature update in Database 23c comes with vector indexes, vector search SQL operators, and new vector data type additions, allowing users to perform vector-driven searches across text, images, audio, and video. It also eliminates the need for an exact keyword match.

AI Vector Search can help streamline multiple business-specific operations such as product recommendations in eCommerce, fraud detection in finance and cybersecurity, content discovery in music and entertainment, better indexing in online search and social media, and much more.

Oracle also announced Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) to Database 23c to simplify the retrieval of relevant insights through natural language prompts from large language models (LLMs) and confidential and sensitive business data.

The addition of vector search capabilities to the Oracle database offering will allow enterprises to add an LLM-based natural language interface inside applications built on the Oracle Database and Autonomous Database. The natural language-based interface, according to the company, enables users of the applications to ask questions about their data without having to write any code.

Check out the Juan Loaiza keynote to find out more: The future of data and app dev

These database innovations are fantastic for Siebel CRM customers, for which Oracle is by far the primary database. Siebel CRM is already supported with the Autonomous Database and work is already underway to validate the new Oracle 23c database release.

 

Super-charged Analytics and Data Intelligence

New AI-powered capabilities within Oracle Analytics Cloud that leverage the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) Generative AI service were very eye-catching. The new capabilities assist analytics self-service users to more quickly and efficiently conduct sophisticated analysis and make better business decisions without having to wait for data scientists or IT teams.

We already have Siebel CRM customers such as American Airlines integrating with the Oracle Analytics Cloud and it will be great to see how the new Generative AI capabilities can shine new insights on their CRM data.

In addition, Oracle’s Modern Data Platform got an uplift with the introduction of the Fusion Data Intelligence Platform, a next-generation data, analytics, and AI platform that will help customers achieve better business outcomes by combining data-driven insights with intelligent decisions and actions. This new platform, an evolution of the Oracle Fusion Analytics Warehouse product, will deliver business data-as-a-service with automated data pipelines, 360-degree data models for key business entities, rich interactive analytics, AI/ML models, and intelligent applications.

All of these out-of-box capabilities run on top of the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) Data Lakehouse services, including Oracle Autonomous Database and Oracle Analytics Cloud, which enables full extensibility at the data, analytics, AI/ML, and application layers.

 

Conclusion

Oracle CloudWorld 2023 was a revelation for Siebel CRM customers. Not only were our key customers talking about how they are reducing TCO with Siebel on OCI but also realising new areas of innovation to drive their business forward. All of the big technological announcements, relate heavily to our strategy and are complementary to the Siebel CRM application and will benefit many of our customers. 

The key takeaway for Siebel CRM customers is that whatever your cloud strategy, hybrid/distributed or public cloud – if you combine the agility of the OCI platform with the Oracle Autonomous Database, Oracle Analytics Cloud and the Fusion Data Intelligence Platform, this is going to be an incredible platform for innovation and to embrace the latest A.I. technologies quicker and cheaper than anywhere else.

Keynote presentations:

Siebel CRM sessions:

Click here for the full catalog of Siebel CRM sessions and to download the presentations.

 

I would highly recommend attending the regional events on the upcoming CloudWorld Tour – and on behalf of the Siebel CRM team we hope to see you next year in Las Vegas!