Oracle Open World 2010′s CRM news

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.

Fusion Applications will be delivered as a complete suite of modular applications. The Customer Relationship Management (CRM) has been defined as a separate product family including modules for the Customer Master, Sales, Marketing, Incentive Compensation, Mobile and Outlook Integration, Territory and Quota Management and a final module to deliver KPIs, dashboards and visualization.

The Sales Performance Suite has analytics support built in resulting in some interesting applications for sales planning, territory planning, predictive analysis. The goal of Oracle’s vision of sales performance is to help organizations better ensure adequate opportunity across all sales territories and with better coverage achieve better results overall. On the other side of the coin, new or improved applications designed to help vendors better understand customer lifetime value come with more social media.

As Anthony Lye explained in one of his team’s presentations, customer lifetime value used to be measured only by the amount of revenue a vendor could expect from a customer. Now, though, with the addition of better analytics and social tools, customer lifetime value is being extended to include the value of a person’s social network and the likelihood that a person will tell his or her network about a product or service. It’s viral marketing on a grand scale, and one term the company is using — “Social Activity Stream” — should become popular.

Siebel CRM

Little has been revealed yet regarding new functionality planned in future releases of Oracle’s on-premise Siebel CRM application. Taking in mind that current developments focus on improvements for Public Sector only, and Fusion CRM functionality seems to focus on Sales only (leaving questions marks for marketing, service and case management), may indicate that Oracle is shifting focus of developments by module. I.e. Fusion CRM may already be the preferred platform for Sales, with Marketing, Service and Case Management to be added in the near future. A potential strategy for completing Fusion CRM and phasing out Siebel CRM.

 CRM On Demand

Anthony Lye, said that that CRM on Demand’s newest release is adding a best in class marketing solution to the existing product. According to experts in the field this is great news because the marketing piece had always been lacking. Customers always had to go to third party solutions for marketing solutions and they ended up with two contracts, two databases and two pipelines.  Customers want and expect one pipeline and one system that can handle sales, marketing and support. Oracle is now going to be able to offer something that can provide a single solution for all these elements instead of having customers go to multiple parties to make this happen.  

Release 18 is also going to add a social relationship management feature, basically integrating social media into the product. Anthony also mentioned that Release 18 is going to add business planning features for territories, opportunities and accounts. These business plans which are typically written outside the CRM application in tools like Word can now be brought into the CRM system. Users will be able to monitor how well they perform against their business plan.

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Posted by: Marc Verkuijl (2 post(s)).

1. CRM On Demand Release 18 Look Back & Forward to OOW | On Demand Education Ltd – Blog