We Blog CRM

Nucleus Research, a provider of information technology research and advisory services, today released its Siebel CRM On Demand Guidebook.

The guidebook summarizes experiences of both recent and long-time customers of Oracle’s Siebel CRM On Demand in an effort to present best practices in order to maximize value from Siebel CRM On Demand.

The book also promises tips ‘n’ tricks for preventing common CRM pitfalls such as identifying internal “CRM skeptics” and removing the “old school” CRM mindset.

(What, CRM already has an old school?)

The CRM industry’s longest-awaited event of the year – well, in Oracle’s estimation, anyway – took place yesterday with the release of Oracle’s Siebel CRM On Demand 14. The big company promises the requisite advanced customization capabilities and comprehensive integration to increase end-user productivity.

Siebel CRM On Demand provides embedded analytics and a pre-built data warehouse to drive real-time decision making; a built-in virtual call center to support call agents; and industry editions.

Though little concrete information beyond “within the next twelve months” was given by company PR for an actual release date on ol’ number 14, the price has been set at $70 per user per month.

And press material as always reminds us that “Oracle is the world’s largest enterprise software company.”

From the Collaborate ‘07: Technology and Applications for the Oracle Community show going down in Las Vega$ this week comes news from – who else? – Oracle.

The Oracle Application Integration Architecture, an open standards-based platform for business process management across Oracle, third-party and custom applications was released, presumably to provide a little “ooh” and “aah” to carry through the rest of the show.

Getting on board the SaaS ship (of a sort), Oracle will deliver pre-built integrations across Oracle ERP, CRM and industry applications using a business process execution language-based platform. These industry-specific programs are called “Process Integration Packs” (No acronym provided here – can we call them PIPs?) and seek to provide pre-integrated business flows across Oracle’s portfolio of applications. The PIPs leverage the Oracle Fusion Middleware SOA Suite.

PIPs currently available include Oracle’s Siebel CRM On Demand Integration Pack for Oracle E-Business Suite, designed to support the opportunity-to-quote process, and Oracle’s Siebel CRM Integration Pack for Oracle E-Business Suite Order Management, which promises support for the order-to-cash process.

Subsequent PIP releases planned include Oracle’s Siebel CRM Integration Pack for i-flex Flexcube Account Originations, an integrated front-to-back-office banking solution; Oracle’s Siebel Call Center Integration Pack for Oracle Adverse Event Reporting System, intended to support a complete closed-loop “adverse event” (gotta love the euphemism there) and complaint (ah, that’s better) solution; Siebel CRM Trade Promotions and Deductions Integration Pack for Oracle E-Business Suite, which is expected to provide a closed-loop trade promotional process for consumer goods companies; Communications Integration Packs for Siebel CRM, Oracle Billing and Revenue Management and Oracle Financials for the concept-to-launch and order-to-cash processes; Multi-Order Channel Management Integration Pack for Siebel CRM, Oracle E-Business Suite and Oracle Retail; Siebel CRM On Demand Integration Pack for Oracle’s JD Edwards EnterpriseOne; Oracle Transportation Management Integration Pack for JD Edwards EnterpriseOne, to support rate and route shopping during sales order entry; and Oracle’s PeopleSoft Financials Integration Pack for Oracle Financial Services Accounting Hub, which is promised to allow users in the financial services industry to consolidate information from back-office systems into the Oracle Financial Services Accounting Hub and PeopleSoft General Ledger.

OneNeck IT Services was able to take pride in the announcement of achieving “Certified Oracle Partner” status in ERP hosting services. OneNeck stated along with the news that the quasi-mysterious “Black Book of Outsourcing” had rated the firm the number one ERP management outsourcer.

“OneNeck’s ability to be a single service provider for complex and critical systems implementation, integration, and hosting has sparked significant growth in our relationship with Oracle,” said colorfully named OneNeck CEO Chuck Vermillion.

Oracle representatives have announced Oracle Siebel wireless support for Blackberry smartphones from Research In Motion.

Oracle’s Siebel Wireless for BlackBerry seek to assist enterprises in extending CRM data to executives, sales teams and field services engineers equipped with BlackBerry smartphones in order to conduct real-time communications and transactions.

In addition to having access to corporate email, phone and other applications, users can manage customer interaction, service tasks, assess critical corporate data and collaborate with other team members. Users can push notifications or data to any user via the BlackBerry push-based email, voice and SMS text messaging channels.

Research In Motion is a designer, manufacturer and marketer of wireless solutions for the worldwide mobile communications market. Founded in 1984 and based in Waterloo, Ontario, RIM operates offices in North America, Europe and Asia Pacific.

On-demand sales compensation management software provider Xactly Corporation has announced its entry into the Oracle partner network (or OPN). Xactly will be integrating Oracle’s Siebel CRM On Demand and Xactly’s Xactly Incent sales compensation management products.

Under terms of the CRM On Demand Go-to-Market initiative under OPN, Xactly is promised resources and support to develop the integration. Specific efforts are focused on delivery of single sign-on between the two applications; seamless data transfer between both applications; and integration via Xactly’s “Incentive Estimator.”

Xactly lays claim to status as “the first and only company completely focused on delivering a 100 percent on-demand sales compensation management solution.”

Oracle today announced specific enhancements to Siebel CRM 8 for the life sciences industry.

As part of Siebel CRM 8, Siebel Life Sciences introduces new capabilities designed to optimize territory realignments and clinical trial activities. In addition, this release, which was delivered as part of Oracle’s "Applications Unlimited" program, offers users a superior ownership experience with a choice of multiple deployment options, ease of manageability and low-cost integration.

Some specific modules touted with Siebel CRM 8 being touted by The Big Company include:

• Siebel Pharma, with new account contact targeting capabilities that allow users to treat the association between an account and a contact as a single entity. Enhancements also allow users to create departments within a hospital and affiliate physicians to them.

• Siebel Life Sciences Territory Management, just enhanced for broader territory definitions and simplifying administrative tasks.

• Siebel Clinical has been enhanced with regard to management of complex case report forms from a single site.

And Oracle, as company PR reminds us, is the world’s largest enterprise software company.

Every so often, it happens. Most of the workweek (or even two) flies by without word about the “world’s largest enterprise software company,” followed by a blizzard of items in a 24-hour span. It seems today is that day for Oracle and thus for CRMchump.

In no particular order, then…

Oracle today announced the Oracle Management Pack for Identity Management, which promises to provide a single, unified management program for Oracle Identity Management customers as an extension of Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g. The big company is touting the identity management product as a way to centralize the management and monitoring of their identity systems from operating system through application layer to the end-user.

Key features plugged by Oracle in the release include “Discovery,” a one-step discovery and graphic display of Oracle Identity Management components and other applications running identity management servers; “Monitoring,” which tracks metrics such as availability performance and related principles; “Service Level Management,” a service dashboard to monitor the status of key components of the identity system; and “Configuration Management,” which enables tracking of changes made to identity management configuration.

The Oracle Identity Management suite itself serves as security backbone for Oracle Fusion Middleware, Oracle Identity Management and includes Oracle Identity Manager, Oracle Access Manager, Oracle Virtual Directory, Oracle Internet Directory, Oracle Enterprise Single Sign-On Suite, Oracle Identity Federation and Oracle Web Services Manager.

The Oracle folks have also announced that the Philadelphia Housing Authority has implemented Oracle’s PeopleSoft Enterprise Customer Relationship Management and PeopleSoft Enterprise Support to “help provide a more positive service experience for housing authority customers and the public.”

The PHA reportedly worked closely with Oracle Consulting to create a unified customer interface and case management system; Oracle product is integrated with telephony gear from Verizon, Nortel and AMC.

Said to be the fourth largest housing authority in the United States and the biggest landlord in Pennsylvania, the PHA develops, acquires, leases and operates affordable housing for city residents with limited incomes. The agency receives more than 4,000 calls per day from tenants, applicants and vendors.

Current PHA plans call for the organization to roll out the PeopleSoft Enterprise Support system to 150 additional agents in 15 locations across the city. In addition, the agency also seeks to extend the functionality of its Oracle PeopleSoft Enterprise applications by upgrading PeopleSoft Enterprise Financial Management; supplementing its PeopleSoft Enterprise Supply Chain Management system with the implementation of the PeopleSoft Enterprise eProcurement module; developing new housing-specific CRM applications including PeopleSoft Enterprise Applicant Waiting List, Eligibility Processing and Tenant Management applications; and adding additional marketing functionality to support event and media planning.

If you’re thinking that such a heavy Oracle presence with a Philadelphia government-related enterprise is strange, you’re not alone. Apparently, the PHA did not consult with Philly waterworks and the mayoral council, who were on the wrong end of Project Ocean, an $18.1 million debacle, an abject embarrassment which muddied the Oracle name more than a bit.

Another displeased Oracle customer, Korea’s LGcard, stepped forward today to announce that the firm would be giving its CRM system a makeover and scrapping the Siebel CRM product it had been using since 2000.

Korea-based online publication The Digital Daily quoted LGcard CIO Heo Joo Byung as stating that “The existing CRM system that we have used was not user friendly so we decided to change the system into a relatively light and user friendly one.”

According to Digital Daily, the new CRM system’s implementation began in the third quarter of 2006 and is being implemented in three phases, culminating in the setting up of a call center. The new CRM system is currently scheduled to go live in June. Obzen’s online analytical processing-based eCube Studio is already in operation now.

Reports Digital Daily: “Oracle Korea seems to be embarrassed since it has been seeking to leap forward in the CRM market with Siebel’s brand power. What’s more, losing LGcard is very disappointing for Oracle Korea who is trying to keep its customers from turning away, with the recent operation of the ‘Application Unlimited program” and, even worse, that “Other financial institutions are likely to follow suit” when choosing to upgrade from Siebel, for which there was a “frenzy” when financial services starting implementing Siebel en masse a few years ago.

An official statement from Oracle Korea, in an interesting show of utter denial, read “We do not know about any full-scale reestablishment of the system in LGcard although there might be partial make up for the existing CRM system.”

Exactly one year after high-profile Oracle completed the highest-profile of all its high-profile acquisitions, the big guys announced the general availability of Oracle’s Siebel CRM Release 8. The announcement was perhaps the biggest of the general media blitz Oracle perpetuated during the "Applications Unlimited" event held on six continents over 24 hours on Tuesday/Wednesday/Thursday.

Back in January 2006, Oracle president Charles Phillips stated upon completion of the hee-yuge $5.85 billion deal that "Siebel’s expertise with industry-specific customer-facing applications combined with rich analytics will […] serve as the centerpiece of our CRM strategy for Oracle Fusion Applications…” The “Applications Unlimited” event, then, could be looked upon as the first day in the rest of Oracle’s business life.

Siebel 8 is promised to provide comprehensive support for Service-Oriented Architectures and for non-Oracle technology such as IBM WebSphere, BEA WebLogic, SQL Server 2005 and IBM DB2. Much ballyhooed, too, is the first-time Siebel support for Linux.

Siebel 8 includes “extensive enhancements” for oft-used products Siebel Sales, Siebel Enterprise Marketing, Siebel Customer Order Management, Siebel Contact Center and Service, Siebel Universal Customer Master and Siebel Self Service and eBilling applications; the product will be touted in public sector, communications, utilities, life sciences, financial services, insurance, manufacturing, high-technology, automotive goods, and consumer packaged goods industries. (Did Oracle PR leave anything out there?)

Said biggest of big guys, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, last year right about this time: “Oracle is now the undisputed leader in Customer Relationship Management software.” At that time, it may have been a bit of boasting. Perhaps one year later, we’ll see if Oracle’s a leader in innovation or if the self-proclaimed “world’s largest enterprise software company” is only really good at buying companies.

Of course, Siebel CRM wasn’t the only product to get the limelight, as the company released a virtual “what’s what” of the Oracle line: New to the world are Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12, PeopleSoft Enterprise 9.0, JD Edwards EnterpriseOne 8.12, and JD Edwards World A9.1.

“These releases are proof that Oracle is delivering on its strategy to protect and extend customers’ current investments in Oracle’s leading horizontal, specialty and industry suites," said Phillips. Again, um, perhaps we should wait and see just how well these things work…

“Applications Unlimited” also played host to an outlining of Oracle Fusion Applications, Oracle’s next-generation application suite. The Oracle Fusion Applications set was once again described as “designed to be the industry’s first, complete standards-based, SOA built application suite.”

Finally, Oracle also announced in the midst of the blitz that the company will expand its partner program with services for ISVs integrating other product to Oracle applications using good old Oracle Fusion Middleware as a standards-based technology to integrate disparate applications.

Oracle was also celebrating the first anniversary of the "Applications Unlimited" program itself this week, and company representatives reported that some 300 ISVs have initiated or completed integrations with one or more of Oracle’s application lines.

Perhaps its first in 2007, Oracle announced a “strengthening of position in the embedded database market” with the acquisition of open-source database vendor Sleepycat Software.

Sleepycat’s Berkeley DB is part of open-source products including the Linux operating system, the BSD Unix OS, Apache Web server, OpenLDAP directory and the OpenOffice productivity suite.

With the addition of Sleepycat’s embedded database product portfolio, Oracle seeks to provide “enterprise-class support” together with its Oracle Lite for mobile devices and TimesTen for high-performance in-memory database applications.

First developed in 1991, Berkeley DB is the core version of the Sleepycat embedded database, but the open-source vendor had also begun offering Java and XML versions of its database in recent years. Berkeley DB is complementary to Oracle’s other embedded databases, but differs in having no SQL layer and is able to store data in memory or on disk.

Berkeley DB release 4.5 was released in September 2006, and is touted for the ability for users to upgrade or patch a replicated Berkeley DB without having to take the entire system down, multi-version concurrency controls to handle simultaneous multiple database changes, and a replication framework.

At that time, Oracle representatives reported that Oracle research and development was investigating opportunities to get Berkeley DB to work with the Oracle product portfolio, but offered no concrete results.

Oracle also plans a refresh of Berkeley DB XML shortly.