What is Siebel Business Intelligence

Siebel business intelligence is the process of using data from a siebel CRM system (now part of Oracle) for the purposes of reporting. Siebel CRM itself has some business intelligence tools built in, but many organizations prefer to use a more robust solution for siebel business intelligence like cognos or business objects. Siebel business intelligence focuses heavily on sales performance and marketing performance as it relates to sales.

Built-in Siebel Business Intelligence

The built-in reporting modules for siebel business intelligence are provided as a starting point, but like many "built-in" tools they are somewhat limited in functionality and especially flexibility. This single biggest issue with built-in siebel business intelligence tools is the lack of flexibility when it comes to reporting data from siebel against other in-house systems. Through the built-in siebel business intelligence tools it's impossible to report for example on sales plotted against finance data.

External Siebel Business Intelligence

The alternative is to use business intelligence tools designed for siebel. This "external" option provides siebel business intelligence that is significant more robust, that provides much greater range of functions, but that can also be significantly more difficult to deploy. Siebel business intelligence through third party offerings relies on your ability to tie into the siebel database and to extract the right data in order to effectively run the siebel business intelligence system. Using an external siebel business intelligence system, however, has significant benefits, especially for larger organizations that have the technical skills.

Siebel Business Intelligence on Premises

Another distinction that must be made for siebel business intelligence is that of "on premises" vs. "on demand." With on premises siebel business intelligence, the goal is to attach the BI platform to an in-house installation of siebel CRM. Through this type of set up the organization has total control over where the data is located and how to attach to it. Siebel business intelligence from an on premise deployment is typically associated with larger organizations that have purchased Siebel's CRM products and have deployed them in-house. These siebel business intelligence deployments can be expensive and take signifiant amount of time.

Siebel Business Intelligence on Demand

An on-demand deployment of a siebel business intelligence solutions focuses on using data from siebel's web-based CRM suite. Siebel business intelligence focused on the web-based product is very similar to business intelligence related to data from salesforce.com. Because of the web-based nature of the system, siebel business intelligence for the web can have significant restrictions. One alternative is to use a system that offloads the data from the web-based system into an in-house warehosue that the siebel business intelligence system will in turn use.