We Blog CRM

Today, Oracle announced that Forrester Research, Inc., a market research company, named it a leader in CRM Suites in the Forrester Wave, a quarterly report. Oracle’s CRM On Demand was named a leading solution in the CRM Suite for Midsized Organizations, Q2 2010, category. Oracle’s Siebel CRM was named a leader in the CRM Suite for Large Organizations, Q2 2010, category.

The Forrester reports stated that Oracle CRM On Demand “has achieved success in the market by offering the same benefits as other CRM SaaS solutions: quick time-to-value, strong usability, and low upfront costs. This value proposition attracts midsized organizations, and it is finding increasing acceptance in units of large companies.” The reports also praised Oracle’s “innovative” features, including social CRM. Oracle’s social CRM helps increase collaboration within organizations. It also helps companies deliver differentiated sales and services. The report continued to say, “The product offers strong sales force automation (SFA) capabilities and partner channel management, and it provides sound support for customer service, customer data management, and analytics.”

Oracle’s Siebel CRM was named a leader for large organizations. The report said, “Siebel CRM is designed to provide robust capabilities that empower users to better address customer needs… the Siebel CRM product for large organizations has achieved best-of-breed status for most CRM functionalities, including: sales, marketing, customer service, field service, partner relationship management, and customer data management.”

Oracle is delighted to have been recognized by Forrester. The SVP of Oracle CRM, Anthony Lye, said, “Oracle CRM enables organizations of all sizes to transform their customer experience by promoting customer acquisition, increasing loyalty and lowering the cost of marketing, selling and servicing. We are pleased that Forrester recognized Oracle for its diverse range of solutions, targeted industry expertise, and flexible deployment options.”

Oracle’s E-Business Suite CRM and Oracle’s PeopleSoft Enterprise CRM were also mentioned in the Forrester Report as good ERP options. The E-Business suite provides easy integration and is useful in sales compensation management. PeopleSoft Enterprise CRM also provides strong integration benefits.

Currently, Forrester rankings show that SAP and Oracle-Siebel are the leaders in CRM software. However, competition is close at their heels. Because the CRM software market has developed immensely in recent years, this has made it difficult to make distinctions between products. The Forrester report stated that the reason Siebel and SAP do so well is because they are both adequate absolute CRM software products that have a tremendously high usability.

Even with the high level of success that SAP and Siebel have achieved with their products, other companies are close behind. CDC, Microsoft, Oracle’s CRM On Demand application, RightNow, and Salesforce.com are all treading close to SAP and Siebel’s waters.
In particular, CDC’s rise in the rankings is due to a new commitment in its marketing strategies. Also Oracle’s other CRM products, (not including Siebel and On Demand) ranked fairly high as well.

As far as the CRM software market itself; it is still considered relatively healthy. A survey conducted by Forrester showed that out of 455 large organizations, 56% had already put into operation a CRM tool and an additional 17% plan to implement CRM software in the next 12 to 24 months. Another survey illustrated that of 286 businesses, 62% of business and IT professionals have put into use or are growing their customer business intelligence solutions.

New players join Oracle Siebel, Microsoft and Salesforce.com as the market seeks to empower agents and deliver next-generation service. There aren’t a lot of commonalities between the listed vendors in Magic Quadrant except that they have systems to help customers post-sale. To be fair, very few enterprises have cookie-cutter customer service requirements and these vendors try to cater to those unique needs.

The 2010 report includes 15 vendors which meet Gartner Research VP and Distinguished Analyst, Michael Maoz’s criteria for coverage. These vendors all have at least 15 customer references, have had at least five new customers for CSS in the past four quarters in at least two geographic regions and generate at least $7 million in software revenue for core CSS from new clients during the past four quarters. They are also evaluated on their cross-channel customer service efforts and whether the provider is creating or following industry leas as well as the vendor’s relationship with third-party consulting firms and systems integrators and own professional services. Lastly, Maoz’s report also took social integrations capabilities into account.

In his report, Maoz writes that four major initiatives will dominate overall customer service strategies through 2013: tying together service interaction channels; integrating social CRM capabilities, analyzing the customer experience; and apply business rules and knowledge in real time. The current leaders in the 2010 Magic Quadrant for CRM Customer Service Contact Centers rank as so: Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Oracle (Siebel), Pegasystems, RightNow Technologies and Salesforce.com.

Last year, Pegasystems was the sole resident of the Visionary segment because of their idea of matching business rules to specific customer service processes. Maoz lauds Pegasystems for its renewed emphasis on customer service contact centers, a long tail of customer success stories, and a jump in revenue.

RightNow Technologies has focused on the business-to-consumer customer service center where there’s not a need for deepened industry knowledge of expertise, noting that Microsoft and Salesforce.com are more general purpose solutions in this regard as well. However, Maoz points out that RightNow (with its acquisition of HiveLive) and Salesforce.com (for its development of Chatter) are making strong social plays even if they seem to be heavily weighted on the sales side.

The Challengers are Amdocs and SAP. Maoz writes that SAP has yet to tap into the large B2C contact center market but praises their community efforts. Amdocs, on the other hand, is well regarded as a telecommunications contact center provider but does not offer the same resources to other industries.

There are plenty of Niche Players who provide value but “just not to everyone”. They rank: Astute Solutions, Chordiant Software, eGlue, Jacada, Neocase Software, Oracle E-Business Suite, Portrait Software and Sword Ciboodle.

In larger trends, there seems to be more of an interest in improving the agent desktop rather than replacing it. There is a big desire to make things simpler for the service agent – how can they make agents feel smarter and less exposed to the customer? Understanding customer intent and applying the right rule in real time will boost agent confidence and losing the customer’s trust is probably the biggest problem companies are trying to work through.

Needless to say, Dreamforce made a big splash this year with the announcement of Salesforce Chatter, to be launched next year. But how is Dreamforce shaping up in comparison to Oracle’s OpenWorld?

For one thing, attendance at Dreamforce pales in comparison to that of last month’s OpenWorld conference—there are about 19,000 at Dreamforce, while OpenWorld drew almost 20,000 more attendants. Oracle Corporation is much bigger than Salesforce.com, so that could provide some explanation for the disparate attendance records. It is perhaps a little surprising the Dreamforce doesn’t have at least a commensurate attendance record, since cloud-computing has been a hot button topic this year, and Salesforce is pretty much the go-to source for cloud computing trends.

In terms of announcements, the declaration of Salesforce Chatter, which is being described as “Facebook for enterprise,” trumps Oracle’s announcement of Fusion Apps.  Oracle also announced a commitment to incorporating social networking into their CRM platform, but they didn’t present an offering that caused a stir the way Salesforce Chatter did—and it did cause quite a stir, cracking Twitter’s top ten with “#df09” as a trending topic. There is also speculation that Chatter is the new Salesforce cloud—Benioff alluded to four clouds in his keynote, naming Sales Cloud 2, Service Cloud 2, and Custom Cloud 2, and leaving the fourth a mystery (to be revealed tomorrow).

Some attendants of both conferences lamented the long-winded keynote speech, even though most have been enthusiastic about the announcement of Chatter. And Sam Diaz at ZDNet noted that Dreamforce didn’t offer the same caliber of celebrities as OpenWorld: San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom joined Benioff during his keynote, while Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and The Who’s Roger Daltrey attended OpenWorld. Diaz also noted a sense of “showboating overkill” in the speaker introductions.

We won’t be able to really assess the overall success of the conference until the end of the week, but is one of these companies doing “the convention” better?

Last week, Oracle announced the release of PeopleSoft Enterprise CRM 9.1, which they developed after customer feedback indicated businesses were most interested in solutions that could accelerate business performance with a lower cost of ownership. Because no system update is complete without a social media facelift, CRM 9.1 was redesigned to tout a Web 2.0 user interface and experience, with new collaboration tools like wikis, forums and chats, and blogs and tagging. In addition, CRM 9.1 features drag-and-drop interactivity, search windows, and simpler navigation.

PeopleSoft CRM 9.1 is built on Oracle’s PeopleSoft Enterprise PeopleTools 8.50 technology platform, which is a development environment that offers flexibility in managing and integrating applications. Oracle cites the “lower cost of ownership” as being manifested in PeopleSoft’s compatibility with previous application releases—and therefore not requiring upgrades in core CRM applications—but this is a tad misleading because it doesn’t necessarily benefit those who aren’t already Oracle customers. For sales and marketing deployments, CRM 9.1 does provide more precise application configurations, which cuts some of the cost of customization.

Specific to sales and marketing customers, CRM 9.1 aims to lower cost marketing channels and expand reach with SMS messaging and an all-inclusive event manager. There will also be mass sales activity reassignment capabilities for sales managers. Still, PeopleSoft Enterprise CRM 9.1 can be tailored for many different verticals, from higher education to the communications market.

As the economy continues to struggle and companies continue to look for ways to cut back on their budgets, SaaS Software has become an increasingly popular option for many struggling companies. As companies look to scale back on expenditures, software providers are providing the options that allow companies to do this. CRM providers are looking to continue this trend as companies such as Oracle expand into the On-Demand CRM software market.

Although CRM Software has been provided in SaaS format, it has not been as prevalent among CRM Software providers as other industries. However, companies such as Salesforce.com have shown that on-demand CRM providers can survive in an intense CRM software market by providing companies with the flexibility and ease of use commonly associated with SaaS Software.

 Oracle has recently jumped on the bandwagon as it takes on Salesforce.com in the On-Demand CRM marketplace. Currently, with a limited number of On-Demand CRM providers, there is definitely room for more providers in the marketplace. The expanding repertoire of companies to include SaaS CRM software will definitely be beneficial for many companies as companies will have more options to select from and find the solution that fits their company best.

Oracle’s new offering looks to add a host of new options to compete with the already popular Salesforce.com CRM offering. With more customization options as well as more flexibility in pricing plans, Oracle hopes it can succeed and establish a strong customer base in the SaaS CRM market.

The future of SaaS CRM Software looks bright for providers and users. As SaaS Software continues to grow in popularity, this opens up an opportunity for On-Demand CRM providers to establish their presence within this new, yet rapidly expanding market. The introduction of more SaaS CRM providers will simultaneously provide companies with more benefits as companies will benefit from the increased competition among CRM Software providers which will increase product quality while drive down price.

As the SaaS CRM Software market continues to grow, companies should expect better and far more innovative options that once could only be dreamt of.

Oracle has announced that free Oracle business applications for the Apple iPhone are now available. Soon, businesses will be able to access Oracle CRM products on their iPhones. I guess this is to counter the growing friendship between SAP and RIM and also Microsoft and RIM. It will be interesting to see the kind of research and development push mobile CRM gives to hand held devices. Screen size and computational power are an issue as of now. At present the Oracle applications will focus on offering information on key metrics and analytical data. Oracle Business Indicators will allow a business to make company financial trends and supplier information available to its mobile workforce

The Oracle business applications will make use of the Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition Plus and Oracle Business Intelligence Applications, Fusion Edition.

It appears that even the most “social” business functions of marketing and sales are not perfectly happy with the way social CRM is shaping up. These functions would rather have commissions and sales instead of a community.

What I don’t get is that even when they have a good thing going they are getting into cribs and nags about small things. Do they expect the software to close the deals for them. Maybe the whole thing is not as big a deal, maybe it is – for Oracle has come out with Sales Prospector, which is meant to help sales teams or individual sales reps build information-sharing networks that, in theory, will help them close more deals.

Of course, the key here is the sharing of data between salespeople. Would I want to share details on leads with fellow sales guys if my commissions depended on it?

Oracle has announced what it calls call “enhanced support across Oracle’s core BI foundation software, Hyperion Essbase and Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition Plus (Oracle BI Suite EE Plus).”

Regarding Oracle BI Applications company officials state that they “offer new support for the Oracle E-Business Suite R12 including pre-built content and adapters for Financials, Human Capital Management, Order Management & Fulfillment, and Supply Chain modules.”

Read more here

Oracle has announced mobile interoperability with Nokia devices. Now, Nokia products can be used to access Oracle CRM and database software. Much like the Microsoft, BlackBerry, and iEnteprises collaboration, the Oracle and Nokia tie-up will give Oracle further access into the mobile CRM market.

The Oracle-Nokia collaboration offers three-pronged interoperability i.e. Oracle has validated Nokia’s Intellisync Device Management with Oracle’s Siebel CRM software; one can access Oracle Database Lite on Symbian Version 9/S60 Version 3; and run Siebel Wireless can run on the Nokia E90 Communicator.

Oracle has claimed that the combination of CRM and database in a wireless environment will help companies adopt mobile technology across the enterprise. The benefits offered by this partnership include secure and efficient deployment of the mobile CRM, cost effective operations, data security, increased customer satisfaction, and better management of customer issues.

Learn more here.