Upgrade Siebel 6.0 to 7.0 now, upgrade to Oracle Fusion later

Siebel will be the cornerstone of Oracle's CRM product portfolio going forward. New enhancements have been announced for the next 12 months, so the product will continue to be enriched. Oracle has announced "unlimited" support for all the applications that it has acquired, and has pledged not to move customers off their current products unless they desire to do so.

Your primary criteria should be how well your current application fulfills your business needs. I have talked to many Siebel customers who see no need to upgrade to gain additional functionality and are exploring application maintenance outsourcing providers as way to reduce costs.

Fusion applications will become available gradually, and not before 2008. Customers many choose to move towards this architecture in the future, but it will likely be very gradual migration. Oracle has promised there will be direct upgrade paths from current versions of Siebel into the Fusion architecture.

Moving to a completely new provider is probably your most disruptive option. The best way to ensure that you are well positioned to take advantage of the enhancements from Siebel, and potential architectural flexibility of Fusion applications, is make sure you are on the most current version of Siebel that makes sense from a business functionality point of view.