July 07, 2004
AWS and Siebel disaster
I remember when taking a PL/SQL class in Berkeley back in 98 the instructor, who was an old grizzled DBA oracle apps guy, said he had seen failed SAP implementation literally drag companies down, hundreds of millions spent, profits evaporating, etc. Looks like the same type of thing can happen to Siebel implementations - Siebel, in this case for ATT Wireless Services, was one of its core systems, they essentially couldn't do business without it, and when a project when consistently, dramatically went wrong for years and hit a serious deadline, hundreds of millions were lost.
Siebel as a technology has different capabilities - one of them is the ability to customize it to do almost anything, basically a programming environment. When a company does that, to a large extent they become responsible for the technology, and it is hard to sum it up as many of the comments did as simply "Siebel sucks!!? I would say the 6.x to 7.0 was a rough technology move for Siebel, who drank too much of the cool aid involving web based architecture (great for REAL web based apps (Yahoo, Google, etc); I'm on the fence about the benefits for enterprise apps).
In an ironic note, who else but ATT offers a management solution for Siebel - I even posted about it earlier. Guess the management solution they offer doesn't work for their own company.