Interview with Yassine Kabbaj of Siebel Private Cloud

Here at Siebel Essentials, we are always on the watch for interesting developments around Siebel CRM. A few weeks ago, a new company - Siebel Private Cloud - appeared on the internet. They offer Siebel CRM in the cloud, ranging from sandboxes to full production scale deployments without the hassle of installing, maintaining and securing a Siebel server environment.

An offering like this brings up a lot of questions, so we contacted Yassine Kabbaj, founder and CEO of Siebel Private Cloud and he was so kind to agree to the following email interview.

***

Siebel Essentials: What were the reasons why you founded Siebel Private Cloud?
Yassine Kabbaj: After 15 years of Siebel Consulting, I've decided to launch this project for the following reasons:
  • I believe Open UI will give a new breath to this market as it is heading up the right way and opening so many doors.
  • Too many resources are spent setting up and maintaining Siebel environments and my ambition is to provide time and cost effective reliable solutions to start with.
  • Consulting was a great way getting into and understanding IT business, but after a while, I felt I wasn't learning much anymore. It was time to look for new challenges.
SE: What are the offerings of Siebel Private Cloud?
YK: The following services are currently available:

Siebel Sandbox: Appropriate for evaluation, demo or training.
  • One dedicated virtual server for the database instance (Oracle Database 11g Express Edition)
  • One dedicated virtual server for Siebel (Gateway, Siebel Server, Siebel Web Server)
Siebel Development: Appropriate for development and testing
  • Dedicated root server for complete Siebel development environment
  • One dedicated virtual server for the database instance (Oracle Database 11g Express Edition)
    • Four pre-installed Siebel schemas (Development, Test, Acceptance, Training) 
  • Four dedicated virtual servers for Siebel (Development, Test, Acceptance, and Training)
  • Online secured VPN access
  • Daily backup
Siebel Production: Appropriate for Siebel production environments
  • Two dedicated root servers for complete Siebel production environment 
  • One dedicated virtual server for the database instance per dedicated root server (Oracle Database 11g Release 2)
  • One dedicated virtual server for Siebel per dedicated root server 
    • Pre-installed Siebel native load balancing over the 2 dedicated root servers 
  • Online secured VPN Access
  • Daily backup
Siebel Toolbox Server (coming soon):
  • SVN server for Siebel Tools source code integration. 
  • Mantis bug tracker.
  • Jenkins continuous integration system to manage, monitor and execute repeated Siebel jobs (compile, deployments, integration, testing etc ...). 
  • Big Data and Analytics integration
SE: Do your offerings include Oracle product licenses?
YK: Oracle Siebel and Oracle Database license keys are not included. Customers need to obtain license keys through the appropriate channel from Oracle.

Sitemap of the Siebel Sales demo application provided by Siebel Private Cloud.
Click to enlarge.
SE: Can you share some technical details for our readers on the hosting?
YK: Our data-center is located in Germany. It is fitted with redundant network, high-speed access to all internet uplinks, 24/7 monitoring, Juniper routing technology and 620 Gbit bandwidth. The minimum availability of the network is 99%. The servers come with high-performance Intel� Core i7-4770 Quadcore processor and the Haswell architecture.

We use the following software and technologies: 
  • Ubuntu 14.04 Server for Siebel DB 
  • Oracle Linux 5 Server for Siebel Servers 
  • Virtualbox for virtualization 
  • Hadoop and MapReduce for Big Data 
  • Pentaho for analytics
SE: Which Siebel applications are you offering?
YK: We offer all available Siebel applications.

SE: What about highly integrated applications like Siebel Marketing, Universal Customer Master, or Public Sector? How can customers manage the integration with Oracle BI, OEDQ or OPA?
YK: Our Siebel environments are connected via VPN. So basically integration with other applications is more a matter of the quality of the SOA architecture and integration best practices than the Siebel environment itself. In other words, if the pre-existing SOA architecture has been implemented in a loosely coupled manner, than the integration with the Siebel environment should go smoothly.

SE: How will you support customization?
YK: Our service packages are based on Siebel environment templates. Unless it is absolutely necessary, we highly discourage our customers to customize their environments in order to avoid complexity and the resulting maintainability issues. Although it is impossible for our templates to cover all the situations, we constantly try to provide a complete solution able to answer all the potential Siebel business needs in a reliable efficient and cost effective way. We provide full support for Siebel configuration development integration and migration which his is discussed on a case to case basis with our customers according to their specific needs.

SE: Do customers have full Siebel Administrator responsibility to manage their applications and servers? 
YK: Indeed, customers have full Siebel administrator responsibilities to manage their applications and servers. It is their own responsibility to set their own limitations according to their resources' skills.

SE: With the announcement of Oracle to bring Siebel Tools to the web in a future version, will you support it when it arrives or is it too early to tell?
YK: Unless we hit a real blocking issue (which a priori should not happen), we will definitely support Siebel Tools to the web when it arrives.

SE: Could customers use the Siebel Open UI API to create custom themes and JavaScript files (and upload them to the web server)?
YK: Yes, the Siebel web server is co-located with the Siebel application server and the developers have access to the appropriate folders and resources.

SE: What kind of backup plans do you offer for your customers?
YK: Siebel servers are virtual machines which allow daily snapshots (or more frequently if needed). Virtual machine snapshots are used for recovery and implementation rollback. Siebel databases are backed up daily but as virtual machines they can also benefit from the snapshot recovery and rollback feature. More generally, we try our best to help and support our customers and to adapt environments to their specific needs.

SE: Will you offer upgrades to future Siebel versions?
YK: The upgrading to future Siebel versions is indeed a service that we offer.

SE: What message do you have for the Siebel community?
YK: Siebel has not had its last word!

***

Many thanks to Yassine for this interview and good luck with Siebel Private Cloud.

have a nice day

@lex


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