Oracle OpenWorld 2010 facilitated almost 50 sessions on a wide range of Siebel subjects. Also available were 14 demo’s, a CRM lounge, a CRM Experts forum and a CRM Social Reception. Nevertheless, news reporting on Siebel CRM was very limited and seemed to be overshadowed by the anouncement for Fusion Applications to become available Q1 2011. Below an overview of most important CRM related announcements, based on several news reporting agencies.

Fusion CRM

At a press session on Monday, Anthony Lye, Oracle senior vice president of CRM, defined Fusion as “the most modern set of applications on the planet”. The on-premise and on-demand applications are based on the same code base, enabling the ability to switch between both delivery models. “You can deploy it one way and six months later if you want to change, you can.” He added that firms can run their CRM system on one database and their financials on a separate machine, but they would still get a single view of customer data.

The recent launch of Oracle Sales Prospector, an Oracle CRM on Demand solution that seamlessly integrates with Social Networks such as LinkedIn and other Web 2.0 tools, proves that Social Media and 2.0 technologies are slowly being adopted by companies around the world.
Recently Logica’s CRM / Siebel team was invited to organize a workshop on Business-to-Business marketing for the Student Marketing Organization of the Erasmus University Rotterdam. Marc Verkuijl, Siebel Teamlead, and myself, took some time to talk to 30 Business Administration and Marketing students on CRM, Marketing and the concept of Marketing 2.0, from a business-to-business perspective.
The primary objective of this workshop was to create awareness on Logica’s Siebel CRM offerings and career opportunities for recent graduates or students that are about to graduate. We ended up debating B2B marketing 2.0 with approximately 30 students.

A short video (10 minutes) on the B2B marketing event (in Dutch)

The slides used to introduce the concept of B2B marketing 2.0 and start a debate on whether Social Media add value in the B2B market.