OpenText Magellan vs. Oracle Siebel Enterprise Marketing Suite (discontinued)

If you do not have a large budget and are a large organization, I would steer clear of Actuate. If you are looking to do very complex washboarding, I would not use them. Your developers have to be very skilled to work with this. Plan to bring in consultants if necessary to help your process. Adhoc reporting is weak. If your pricing is user based and you expand, this could be very expensive.

If you need a hosted rather than cloud based CRM, Siebel is a consideration. It's best suited to organizations with a large customer database. Given the complexity involved you need at least two full time marketing analysts.The email marketing functionality isn't core to the offering and most organizations would be much better served by cloud based email systems. Siebel offers a very comprehensive feature set and is powerful in the hands of a super user. However, given the costs involved in upgrading a hosted solution I would put serious effort into convincing your decision makers to go for a cloud based CRM instead.

Incentivized

• The report outputs can vary across different types such as HTML, PDF, and Excel
• Their open source offering is very sufficient
• There are great boards and blogs for developers and engineers to expand and use their features.
• The people from the company that I've worked with are professional and courteous.

Incentivized

• Siebel EMS offered useful customer insight and more effective dialogue with recipients by delivering the right message to the right customer at the right time.
• Siebel EMS was very effective for loyalty lifecycle and retention by seamlessly integrating with marketing and CRM platforms.
• Siebel EMS was instrumental in aligning marketing, sales and analytics divisions.

Incentivized

• The documentation on all the available features, but most importantly on the scripting side, can be improved
• The standard look & feel of some basic options, like parameter selection or sorting and filtering, looks dated and can't be customized
• The server portal needs to provide better tools
• More integration is needed with other OpenText products

Incentivized

• Oracle Siebel Marketing Suite's processing time is not as fast as I would expect it to be. This is the major improvement I would like to see in it.
• It requires a very high level of training being given to the employees for configuring and implementing it in the business needs.
• Expert employees are needed in order to understand the functionality of Oracle Siebel Enterprise Marketing Suite, which is not easy to find.

Incentivized

I am no longer working for the company that was using Actuate but I believe they would continue to use it because the stitching costs would be to high. It would require a complete rewrite of the reports and the never version of Actuate (BIRT) even required an almost complete report rewrite

Incentivized

A very conservative data security policy limits the organization to a hosted solution. At particular issue is the tendency of cloud based CRMs to have data centres based in the US, a major issue for Canadian consumers. Once you have integrated a system of this size and complexity, and have the staff resources to utilize it effectively, it's hard to justify a move to an alternative. Consider Siebel if you are a conservatively run organization with a large database of customers and a big marketing team

Incentivized

It is quite intuitive to use. It is fit specifically for doing sentiment, emotion, and intention analysis as well as text classification and text summarization. I would have given 10 if it is fit for the purpose of doing image processing and analysis as well. There is a huge market to analyze video and image data.

Incentivized

Always there on the front and backend for us and the client.

It is vastly superior to these in many ways, for complex reporting it is a much more sophisticated solution. Visualizations are very good. Javascript extensibility is very powerful, others don't support this or as well. Pentaho and MS are both OLAP oriented. Pentaho is moving more toward big data, which was not our primary focus. Others are stuck in the Crystal Reports Band metaphor.

Salesforce is easier to use and more open source and available for external integrations.

Incentivized

• Actuate can handle 50 to 60 sub reports inside a report very well.
• Dynamically creating the datasource, chart, graph, reports are the main advantages. We can do any level of drilling, and can create a performance matrix dashboard efficiently.

• It has increased the business tactics as we have added more clients who wish to use this technology.

Incentivized