Oracle CRM on Demand Independent Review

http://www.crmsearch.com/oracle-crm-review.php
Oracle Forecast: Cloudy with a Chance of Reign
With nearly 5 million users and over 5,000 customers in 145 countries using 27 language sets, Oracle makes its claim as the top CRM software provider. Of course that top position claim is also made by rival SAP. However, despite their competing claims they both recognize the days of CRM software mega-purchases are in decline, the enterprise software market is largely saturated and they must advance to new markets and new revenue streams to keep their growth plans alive. To continue growth and find new competitive differentiation, Oracle is using its Sun acquisition to deliver tightly integrated and optimized hardware and software products as well as continuing to expand its vertical market solutions and its applications business with the long awaited Oracle Fusion Applicationswhich offer the flexibility to run onpremises, on-demand or both. When it comes to software as a service CRM, the market has watched Oracle exhibit a near schizophrenic position regarding the validity and opportunity for software as a service (SaaS) in the business software marketplace. In fact even after inheriting the Siebel on Demand solution as part of the 2005 Siebel Systems acquisition, the SaaS product languished with no major upgrades for 18 months. Nonetheless, despite some initial reservations, Oracle has made up lost time, secured market share and advanced their Oracle CRM on Demand solution to earn a competitive leadership position in the cloud marketplace. Software as a Service CRM Suite CRM on Demand includes a full CRM suite of sales, marketing and service as well as several ancillary modules and vertical market solutions which bring unique positioning to an increasingly crowded cloud market. Sales Force Automation CRM on Demand's sales capabilities are fairly traditional when it comes to account, contact and opportunity management as well as administrative functions such as calendar and task management. Forecasting does deliver somewhat advanced functionality in that multiple simultaneous forecasts can be created using up to four different forecast types across products and services. However, where the sales force automation software delivers unique value is with its sales coaching, closed loop lead management and embedded analytics. The Sales Process Coach is a simple tool to embed process support and even best practices at the point of execution. At any point in the sales cycle, the application can present relevant information, enforce the collection of salient data, or automatically create activities for a member of the sales team. The coaching tool permits sales managers to improve process consistency, replicate the activities of top performers and deliver virtual sales-stage specific coaching. Quota management is another effective sales management tool. Sales managers can design quotas with real time performance visibility to keep sales pros focused on their personal goals. Quotas can be defined as monthly, quarterly, or yearly goals and managers can prorate quotas for sales pros joining a plan already in progress. Quota performance visibility includes plan progress to date compared to closed revenue, expected revenue and forecasted revenue. CRM on Demand uses plug and play gadgets to view important metrics or display always-on data sets. For example, gadgets include search or views of contacts, top accounts, and top deals with visual comparison against sales targets. Users may also create their own gadgets.

Beyond gadgets, the product delivers comparatively strong analytics. Sales intelligence can be interrogated and modeled for expanded insight, or sales staff may benefit from viewing prepackaged analytics such as average sales cycle, win rates, deal size, and other key performance metrics. Similar to Microsoft Dynamics CRM, CRM On Demand uses Microsoft Outlook or a mobile device as an offline client to accommodate sales staff who are not in the office or without Internet connectivity. The workflow tool brings real value for sales teams. For example, companies with products or services which include warranties, contracts or subscription renewals may develop a workflow to email a customer 30 days prior to a contract renewal date and create an activity for the sales person to reach out to the customer. Escalations can then be setup so that if the customer renewal is not received by a specified date, additional resources can be applied. Oracle has diverse social CRM tools but developing a holistic social strategy and equipping its various CRM products with social tools is a slow process. CRM on Demand social CRM capabilities include contact integration with social network streams such as Facebook or LinkedIn through feeds and RSS subscriptions. This is useful for sales pros that want to keep current with the online activities of their prospects. The company has released Fusion social apps as well as apps that run on its enterprise social networking platform. Separate from the CRM On Demand solution, these apps are purpose-built to help salespeople within a company collaborate and close deals based on shared information. For example, Oracle Sales Prospector searches reams of sales-data and purchase-history information to guide sales pros to the most likely prospects for a product or service. It informs salespeople with a graphical view on those potential deals most likely to close within specific time frames, and estimates the likelihood to close, time to close, and the expected revenue. It's an impressive component, but not part of the CRM on Demand suite. Comparatively speaking, the CRM on Demand product lags other SaaS CRM solutions in social media adoption. Partner Relationship Management (PRM) is a natural extension to SFA for businesses with indirect sales channels. The Partner Portal supports key PRM features such as unique themes and layouts for different partner types, a Solutions repository for content sharing, a tabulation of training and certifications, deal registration and an approval process for special pricing requests. The co-op or MDF (Marketing Development Funds) financial management permits brand owners to budget and approve funds for partners. Based upon configured business rules, partners may draw down those funds pursuant to automated requests or an approval process. Partners may then submit claims with proof-of-performance to be reimbursed for approved expenditures. Brand owners have the ability to control approvals at each step in the process. Lead management functionality permits brand owners to route leads to internal sales reps, channel reps or partners. Leads routed to partners can be sent to a named user, an entire partner organization, or a lead pool consisting of multiple partners that claim leads on a first-come, first-served basis. Brand owners can monitor distributed leads for follow-up actions or reassign if no action takes place. Once leads are qualified, partners can convert them to registered deals. The partner portal also supports delegated user administration. Once a partner is activated, a designated partner resource can create and maintain the other users for that company, offloading the responsibility from the brand owner and avoiding potential bottlenecks for partners bringing new reps on board. Marketing Software Marketing is a key strength for Oracle on Demand. As published in separate Vantive Media advisories, with the exception of RightNow Technologies, most SaaS CRM suites give little credence to marketing automation making this the weakest component among CRM suites. Oracle has elevated the marketing function to keep pace with sales and service as well as outpace the rest of the cloud CRM competitors in this category. Release 18 delivered advanced lead management and integrated sales and marketing not found in other on demand CRM suites. In fact for SaaS CRM competitors to achieve comparable lead acquisition and management capabilities

requires a third party marketing automation product such as Aprimo, Eloqua, Marketo or Pardot. In reality, these third party lead management solutions may exceed Oracle's standard marketing capabilities in some areas so customers must determine just how much marketing automation is right for them. Oracle's lead management stems from its 2010 Market2Lead acquisition and includes tools for landing pages and microsites, digital prospect tracking, progressive profiling, lead scoring, email marketing, nurture campaigns, automated distribution of sales-ready leads to the sales team and marketing analytics. With a single vendor sales force automation and lead management solution customers achieve cost savings, tighter integration, a unified revenue pipeline and a single data repository for sales and marketing reporting. The email marketing capability facilitates professional quality HTML and text email campaigns based on segmentation and flexible customer data fields, conditional logic for more personalized messaging and delivery response tracking of opens, click-throughs, bounces and opt-outs. Using the workflow tool in the marketing module, managers can create notifications or escalations to ensure that salesready leads distributed to the sales force are followed up timely. Customer Service Service accommodates incident resolution with traditional case or ticket management functionality. Flexible assignment rules route service requests to designated agents who can then use scripts or knowledge base access to retrieve solutions. Incident escalations can be flexibly configured using the workflow tool. The knowledge base uses search and a solution scoring feature to rank relevance among multiple answers and help ensure the most useful responses gravitate to the top for future inquiries. Service pros can add their own solutions to the knowledge base in order to expand the breadth and depth of the repository over time. Service includes customer satisfaction surveys to monitor customers' service experience and ensure that managers receive early warnings to take corrective actions when necessary. Service can also be used for light inventory management objectives. For example, support tickets can associate products or services with cases and customer accounts to track inventory or asset information such as SKU, associated part, warranty, and contract information. Flexible custom fields can be inserted to increase product tracking depth or develop analysis reports by product attribute. This solution won't compare as well to CRM applications with fully-integrated back office accounting or ERP systems, however, does better than most CRM-only solutions. For contact centers, CRM On Demand is integrated with Oracle Contact On Demand, a hosted contact center module. Oracle Contact On Demand manages multi-channel supportvoice, voicemail, fax, email, chat and Webas well as unified communications of phone calls, emails, chats and more into a single queue, email to case receipt with auto response, computer telephone integration (CTI) with inbound screen pops, hosted automated call distribution (ACD), interactive voice response (IVR) call routing, additional call routing based on workflow rules, call recording and interaction tracking, knowledge management and various other tools essential for contact center operations. I also liked the Whisper Coaching feature which permits supervisors to speak with agents during customer calls without the customer hearing the sidebar conversation. It can also be used during supervisor-to-agent chat. While service dashboards and reports are comparable to other CRM competitor solutions, Oracle's data warehousing and OLAP (online analytical processing) gives its product a clear edge in business intelligence. Additional CRM Suite Breadth In addition to the core CRM applications of sales, marketing and service, CRM on Demand offers a unique app called Deal Management which analyzes price points for improved pricing and profitability in the opportunity management process. It delivers an understanding of market pricing by comparing the current deal against like deals and permits sales pros and sales managers to perform what-if modeling against alternative pricing or margin goals. This module is strong tool for

businesses that recognize items rarely sell at list price, however, price is the most important lever businesses have to improve profits. Additional unique or high value features across the CRM suite include the following: A tailorable presentation layer. The user interface supports application resizing, several themes, simple skinning and custom logos to rebrand the application for a more personal look. Mobile CRM is fulfilled with two solutions. Oracle Mobile Sales Assistant operates in both connected and disconnected modes on the RIM Blackberry, iPhone and iPad and provides access to salient account, contact, opportunity and calendar information, and supports productivity measures such as note taking and maps integration. Oracle plans to support Android in the future. The Mobile Sales Forecast app operates on the iPhone and iPad and delivers real time access to the opportunity pipeline. It permits limited filtering of opportunities for pipeline modeling, comparison to quota plans and offline access using data caching. Both apps are intuitive and well designed for mobile form factors, however, there's really no reason they shouldn't be merged into a single mobile app. Time-based workflows automate business processes and are capable of inserting records and distributing notifications. Workflow definitions are flexible and permit configuring a 'wait' step or time-based trigger for any process step. This is a powerful tool for automating business processes. CRM on Demand support for vertical markets is uniquely strong. In fact, while most SaaS CRM systems use the same horizontal CRM product and customize a few fields or the services implementation delivery for their claimed industries, Oracle's on-demand software has been more deeply tailored to accommodate industry-specific feature sets and business requirements. For example, CRM for Life Sciences includes mass creation of planned sales calls, assessment types, book of business support for samples and enhanced PDC assessments. Similarly, CRM for Insurance includes needed capabilities such as policy origination support (OPA integration), policy object enhancements (audit, custom object association, attachment and book support, dynamic layout support), books of financial plans, risk classification and premium calculations, claims adjudication and payment calculations, and self-service quoting for customers and brokers. The adaptive business planning functionality is unique among SaaS CRM systems and particularly relevant for both growth companies and businesses realigning themselves in response to events such as the lingering global recession. Oracle's system facilitates planning and execution with capabilities such as trend analysis which delivers early visibility into potential disruptions and subsequent updates to modified plans. The ability to dynamically realign business and sales planning capabilities empowers companies to more quickly respond to changing business scenarios or fluid market conditions. The system provides email synchronization with Outlook and Lotus Notes. And very similar to Microsoft Dynamics CRM, with release 19 Oracle CRM now also offers an Outlook UI which delivers CRM on Demand directly from an Outlook interface that includes leads, accounts, opportunities and PIM data (contacts, tasks and appointments). This CRM Desktop for Outlook operates in both connected and disconnected modes, thereby also delivering an offline edition. For the more than 400 million global Outlook users, this familiar CRM interface may be effective for adoption and productivity. Deployment Considerations Oracle offers the most deployment options in the SaaS CRM industry. Oracle On Demand can be deployed using a multi-tenant cloud model, a single-tenant cloud model or on-premises. In fact, multiple alternatives are available within the single-tenant cloud option. A Standard single-tenant option is priced at $90.00 per user per month and is hosted on a dedicated (virtualized) server in which Oracle administers maintenance and upgrades according to its schedule. For increased flexibility, and $125.00 per user per month, customers may choose the Enterprise single-tenant edition which includes an isolated application instance, dedicated database, application server and analytics server. This option grants the customer the choice of when to provision patches and implement upgrades. These later two options permit a greater degree of custom application performance tuning and can make sense for businesses which incur significant integration or customization and want control for all upgrades. They may also appeal to data privacy and information security conscience organizations. Unfortunately, these isolated tenancy models are not available to most small and midsize businesses (SMBs) as there is a 350 user minimum.

Data Center and Hosting Delivery Oracle seems to apply more investment and rigor in its data center delivery, performance and uptime than most SaaS CRM companies. In fact, it already operates more geographically dispersed Tier IV data centers on more continents than any other CRM vendor, except RightNow. Oracle CRM on Demand data centers reside in Austin, Texas, Linlithgow, Scotland and Sydney, Australia, with standby data centers in locations not known for natural disasters such as Colorado Springs. Oracle disclosed at OpenWorld 2011 that the company plans to open new data center locations in China, India and Singapore. In addition to geographically diverse data centers, Oracle stands ahead of most of the cloud CRM pack due to its guaranteed Service Level Agreements (SLA), rigor in information security and high availability, and data center third party attestations. Unlike most, but not all SaaS CRM vendors, Oracle offers an SLAand backs it up with a financial guarantee. And in addition to guaranteed uptime, Oracle uses its Data Guard technology to provide a real-time synchronization between production and standby data centers, which in turn allows Oracle to provide the industry's only guaranteed Recovery Point Objective (RPO). This added level of assurance recognizes that over a long enough period, downtime will occur, but the procedures and testing are in place to return delivery in the shortest period possible. Oracle Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery are among the best we've reviewed. Disasters may be caused by local incidents such as building fires, regional incidents like earthquakes, or even international incidents like pandemic illnesses. To mitigate disaster effects, Oracle operates its data centers pursuant multiple levels of redundancy, continuous data synchronization, near real-time fail-over, a comprehensive ISMS (Information Security Management System) and periodic disaster recovery rehearsals. While a few other top vendors such as Salesforce.com offer similar business continuity measures, Oracle clearly applies the most investment and rigor we've seen to date. Oracle CRM data centers posses third party certifications including the ISAE 3402 and SSAE 16 (which replaced the more commonly recognized SAS 70 as of June 15, 2011)which along with the ISO 27001comprise the dominant and globally recognized third party attestations for reporting on controls at service organizations. These certifications are a must-have for publicly traded companies, but more so, provide a level of expert assurance for all customers. Oracle is also unique in that it is able to optimize every component in the Oracle CRM On Demand service since it owns and manages all layers of the solution and service including the data center, the database, the application servers, and the application itself. Oracle customers don't run the normal risk of a third-party being unable to deliver the level of service specified by the CRM software publisher. Oracle Public Cloud Looking beyond CRM on Demand and considering the expanding Oracle Fusion suite of applications lies the Oracle Public Cloud. Announced in October 2011, the Oracle Public Cloud is a standards-based and ubiquitous cloud deployment model which includes SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS, permits choice in deployment options (on-premises installations, private clouds or public cloud deployments) and interoperability among cloud providers (such as Amazon EC2, Microsoft Azure or Rackspace). The Oracle Public Cloud is made up of five building blocks, including Fusion apps, Fusion Middleware, the Oracle database, Oracle Linux or Sun Solaris OS, and the Oracle Enterprise Manager. The Fusion apps now include CRM and other business applications such as HCM (Human Capital Management) and SCM (Supply Chain Management). They also natively embed the recently released Oracle Social Network which also operates on mobile devices and tablets. The standards Oracle refers to in making its cloud portable include Java, SQL, XML, Web Services, SOA and support for popular browsers. These are legitimate 'industry-standards' that enable cross platform and multi-vendor hosting operation, but are likely insufficient by themselves to make portability a plug and play endeavor. While choice of deployment models is not unique among CRM software vendors, except for Salesforce.com which does not support CRM deployment on-premises, in a private cloud or on a public cloud, the flexibility to move business applications from inhouse to a hosting provider, or vice versa, may align with many company IT strategies. More so, because of the standards-based architecture, Oracle Public Cloud delivers the interoperability to run Oracle Fusion applications on the Oracle cloud, while choosing to off-load certain processes or store data internally or on other third party clouds. The caveat though is that all clouds in the mix must be running the Oracle

database. Potential buyers must also recognize that at this early stage the Oracle Public Cloud is more aspirational than verifiable, and yet unproven. Integration and Customization Software integration can be accommodated with built-in data exchange tools, prebuilt integrations and traditional web service APIs based on XML/SOAP standards. Integration routines and extensions permit users to extend and embed external content and custom HTML to create mashups. At the application and process levels, integration events used in conjunction with the workflow tool support automated triggers for cross-application processes based on changes to information in the CRM system. Oracle also offers XML web services for integration at the data layer, while adhering to business rules and system integrity validation. Using tools such as IBM WebSphere, Microsoft .NET or BEA WebLogic, administrators can use XML/SOAP APIs to access business logic and data services and retrieve, modify, create, delete or synchronize information. The CRM On Demand Integration Pack uses Fusion middleware and a prebuilt connector to link up CRM on Demand with the Oracle E-Business Suite at the presentation, application and data layers in order to extend front office business processes to the back office and deliver a more comprehensive view of the customer relationship. New customer and contact records created in On Demand are automatically sync'd with E-Business Suite making this a good solution for E-Business Suite customers seeking a tier 2 CRM solution for regional, line of business or satellite office locations. An additional integration pack is available for JD Edwards EnterpriseOne. CRM on Demand permits software customization at the presentation, application and data layers. The primary business process customization tools include workflow and advanced field management. Both tools facilitate customization within the constructs of the application, do not impact source code and are designed to not break during upgrades. Customers also have the option to configure extensions or uploaded custom content as web applets or web tabs. Basic customizations and files such as JavaScript, SWF, HTML and CSS can be uploaded to Oracle hosting. Presentation layer personalization is performed via software configuration. Beyond selection of themes and skins, tabs can be re-named, re-sequenced and hidden. Search can be configured to display more relevant search results. Screens and forms can be modified to include dynamic layouts, and display different types of records in different page structures. Dynamic layouts are effective in reducing clutter and delivering only the information users need for each record type. The application layer may be modified or extended with the workflow tool, scripting or advanced field management. Data layer modification supports custom fields, custom objects and custom data relationships, enabling organizations to link custom objects to prebuilt objects or to other custom objects. Back with release 16 Oracle expanded the application from a limit of three custom objects per system to an unlimited number. CRM On Demand vertical market editions are available for the automotive, financial services, high technology, insurance, life sciences, and wealth management industries. Each industry version features out-of-the-box business processes, data models, object models, and business logic designed to support unique requirements for these industries. Industry specific structural capabilities include: At the presentation layer, the user interface offers industry-specific views and application flows as well as industry specific data objects and tabs. At the data level, the system extends relationships among multiple data objectssuch as an enhanced data model supporting B2C and B2B sales. At the process level, the system delivers prebuilt industry specific business process workflows and analytics for more relevant reporting. Software Technology While not specific to CRM On Demand, understanding Oracle's technology strategy, options and upgrade paths entails understanding Fusion. Oracle Fusion Applications (OFA) are a portfolio of business software products including CRM, financials, human capital management, supply chain management, procurement, governance, and project portfolio management. OFA was first announced shortly after Oracle's acquisitions of Peoplesoft, JD Edwards, and Siebel Systems in 2005 and finally released in September, 2010. The product strategy was originally pitched as a super-app morphed from the best capabilities of each of Oracle's legacy ERP and CRM productsdeveloped in Java with modern standardsbased technology, constructed in a component-based modularity, architected for multi-tenant on demand or on premises delivery, and rich with social tools and embedded analytics.

Customer concerns about OFA being positioned as a forced replacement technology for legacy products prompted Oracle to supplement its Fusion strategy with Oracle Applications Unlimiteda coexistent program introduced in 2006 to assure legacy application customers that Oracle will continue to support and advance those solutions. OFA will target the enterprise market and not the middle market, however, Fusion will augment Oracle Applications Unlimited as well as Oracle's middle market solutions, primarily the JD Edwards and E-Business Suite products. Fusion apps will be delivered as a phased unveiling, but already there are over 100 available Oracle Fusion Applications, and in fact about 34 sales and marketing applications. Fusion Applications are not yet standalone business suites. All OFA are designed to use the same product in a variety of deployment models, including software as a service, hosted or on-premises. We believe this code continuity delivers a strategic long term advantage to Oracle who will eventually mature a single code base and for its customers who may incur business reasons to change their deployment choices over time. Oracle On Demand customers will have options to leverage Fusion apps as extensions, or look to Fusion as an upgrade and replacement strategy. There is a planned upgrade path from CRM on Demand to OFA. Software Pricing Oracle CRM on Demand pricing begins at $75.00 per user per month based on an annual subscription agreement. The single-tenant Standard version (whereby Oracle dictates the maintenance and upgrade schedule) is priced at $90.00 per user per month. The single-tenant Enterprise edition (whereby the customer dictates the maintenance and upgrade schedule) is priced at $125.00 per user per month. Customers may deploy CRM on Demand on-premises for $110.00 per user per month. Oracle Viability While history has shown us that even mega-companies such as Arthur Andersen, Enron, Lehman Brothers and Nortel are not immune from sudden death, Oracle's downside risk is less about extinction and more about erosion. Oracle's market and fiscal position is substantial. The most recent Forbes 2000 list shows Oracle as the largest software company in the worldnotably ahead of competitors IBM, Microsoft and SAP. The company employs more than 108,000 staff, retains more than 380,000 customers, including all 100 of the Fortune 100, and counts global deployments in more than 145 countries. Other factors which suggest corporate longevity and staying power include the following. Oracle has succeeded over three decades by building good products first and foremost. As Larry Ellison succinctly states, "If we built the right products the right way, we [] win. That was my view of the world then, and that's my view of the world now." Oracle operates three segmentssoftware, hardware systems and servicesand each maintains category leadership in a number of hardware and software technology markets as espoused by a number of recognized analysts and market research firms. Within the category of CRM software, Oracle is a leader, but not the leader. Oracle and rival SAP trade barbs and competitive rankings depending upon the measurement metrics, analyst firm and period. Even with its history, accomplishments and trajectory, Oracle faces increasingly stiff competition from both long-time rivals (SAP) and newer-comers (Salesforce.com). However, you don't have to follow Oracle long before you recognize the company's biggest challenges are internal. Oracle struggles in messaging more than one product at a time, and right now the metal and silicon products of Exalogic, Exadata, and Exalytics are consuming all the oxygen in the room leaving both Fusion CRM and CRM on Demand jockeying for scarce attention. While not due to the quality or competitiveness of their CRM products, Oracle is not a thought leader in CRM. Since the January 2010 acquisition of Sun Microsystems, Oracle appears more splintered than ever before. The benefits of Engineered Systems are apparent, but a symbiotic strategy for how Oracle unifies its big data, big machines, feeds and speeds of the hardware side with the business and top line revenue requirements for the apps, cloud and social software side remain elusive. If these two sides continue to diverge, Oracle's focus will stray as well. 7

Few organizations can become category leaders without showing true innovation, however, Oracle may be an exception. Oracle is an acquirer of innovation and fast follower of market successes. The risk however is that this strategy normally only works when you're already a market leader, and does little more than maintain position. It's also susceptible to missing competitors until it's too late. Salesforce.com has shown that even a start-up that can innovate and bring disruptive change to an industry, while old guard category leaders dismiss or delay their fast following opportunity until it's too late. Oracle is a relatively closed, private and non-transparent company. It doesn't practice the social CRM strategiessuch as the change from monologue to dialogue among customers and their supplierssupported by its own social CRM products. Except for sales and marketing activities, the company doesn't engage with the broader community of customers, analysts, bloggers and media like competitors IBM, Microsoft, Salesforce.com and SAP do. While all companies have multiple stakeholders to satisfy, such as shareholders, employees and customers, Oracle has the reputation of a strongly lopsided preference for investors at the expense of customers. Many suggest that Oracle's appetite for acquisitions isn't matched by its desire to partner with customers. While a lack of customer-centricity, community engagement and true dialogue may not pose an immediate risk while things are steadily moving along, it incurs great risk if and when a crisis occurs. Or crisis aside, failing to grasp the voice of the customer and falling out of touch with what customers want can only lead to customer erosion. Competitive positioning in the cloud CRM market is highlighted with the following strengths and weaknesses. Oracle CRM Competitive Strengths Oracle is the first SaaS CRM player to embed sophisticated marketing and lead management automation, including landing pages, digital tracking, lead scoring, progressive profiling, nurture campaigns and distribution of sales ready leads. Campaign automation permits marketers to schedule multiple-channel, lights-out campaigns using a visual business process design tool. CRM on Demand delivers the best Business Intelligence (BI) suite in the SaaS CRM industry. Dashboards are configurable and offer drill down for investigative analysis. In addition to role-based dashboards there are industry editions, such as Insurance and Life Sciences, as well as Partner Relationship Management (PRM). The Answers on Demand ad-hoc analysis tool provides users with a solution for creating custom reports, and includes capabilities such as interactive charts and pivot tables. But where Oracle CRM on Demand leaves the competition behind is with its data warehousing and OLAP (online analytical processing). Volumes of data can be reviewed among many dimensions, manipulated and analyzed in real time for learning and insight that just isn't going to be derived from packaged reports. Oracle offers choices when it comes to hosting its CRM on demand product. Customers can take the default multitenant option or can elect an upgrade to a single-tenant option for an increase in price. Further choices among multiple single-tenant versions give customers flexibility to determine planned maintenance windows and software upgrades in order to minimize risk and business interruption. CRM on Demand offers the best enterprise information security in the cloud CRM industry. Nearly all cloud CRM solutions employ reasonable security for data in motion, most notably using the maximum level of SSL encryption permitted by the user's browser or geographical location. However, Oracle leverages its database roots in order to add security layers to data at restand permits encryption down to specified columns and rows or an entire table space. Oracle's hosting IT infrastructureincluding its security governance, people, processes and toolsis one of the most impressive we've reviewed. These added levels of security will be appreciated by security and data privacy conscience organizations and industries such as financial services, government and public sector. Oracle on Demand offers a compelling total cost of ownership (TCO). Its subscription cost is one of the lowest in the on demand CRM industry. While various configurations result in differing subscription amounts, Oracle points out that its product with unlimited custom objects, a sandbox, business intelligence and a lead management system totals about $160.00 per user per month; where equivalent functionality may cost $400 to $500 per month with Salesforce.com (which would require the Enterprise edition and third party products for BI and lead management automation).

Oracle CRM Competitive Weaknesses The UI and user experience doesn't compete favorably with SaaS CRM competitors who have more creatively embraced consumer technologies. While the UI is efficient and satisfactory, it's far from engaging. The On Demand product lags competitors in social CRM capabilities. The Oracle CRM on Demand business partner channel is small and it lacks a mature ecosystem of third party plug-in solutions. While Oracle is steadily growing their indirect partner channel, it remains a fraction of what competitors offer to the marketplace. Mobile solutions are good, however, support limited devices. The Mobile Sales Assistant operates on RIM Blackberry and iPhone, while the Mobile Sales Forecast only operates on the iPhone. Certain functions (i.e. Email Marketing) only support the IE browser while others support only IE and Firefox browsers. No email synchronization with Gmail. Oracle CRM on Demand Sweet Spot Short list CRM on Demand when: Searching for a low total cost of ownership (TCO) CRM suite. If you feel you may change software delivery methods from SaaS to on-premises or vice versa. Your IT department is an Oracle shop. Note that while it seldom makes sense to choose a business application simply based on IT's platform and stack adoption, there may be significant opportunities from Oracle's Fusion roadmap for CRM on Demand customers. These need to be explored. You're looking for a tier 2 CRM system; whether your tier 1 is E-Business Suite or another product. Your business is in the automotive, high technology, insurance, life sciences, or wealth management industry. Oracle's industry software support is not limited to simple re-configuration and brochureware common among CRM players claiming vertical solutions, but instead makes extensions to the data model, includes unique industry records and columns, and defines industry specific business processes. You're seeking an on-demand CRM suite with a strong contact center component. The service module from most SaaS CRM vendors is a better fit for help desks or small call centers. Only Oracle's CRM Contact on Demand, RightNow Technologies and Salesforce.com, Cloud Suite 3 are capable of stepping up to the needs of more sophisticated contact centers. Alternative Solutions Buyers may be best advised to consider alternative CRM products when: Seeking best of breed CRM solutions. Seeking CRM and tightly integrated social CRM capabilities. Seeking vertically focused solutions outside of Oracle's named industry editions. Oracle Customers Existing Oracle customers are advised to: Consider CRM On Demand if you're an E-Business Suite customer looking for a tier 2 CRM system for regional, line of business or satellite office locations. Consider CRM On Demand if you're looking at Fusion CRM down the road, but need an interim solution now that offers a straight-forward transition process later. Get up to speed on Fusion middleware and investigate Oracle's proposed Application Integration Architecture (AIA) as the tool to make the conversion. Liaise with your Oracle representatives to get detailed product roadmaps and pricing announcements so you may understand how CRM On Demand and Fusion may affect or deliver new capabilities to your existing infrastructure.

Concluding Remarks The current Oracle CRM on Demand Release 19 has delivered CRM Desktop, connected mobile sales, enhanced security and more depth in vertical market editions such as life sciences, insurance and financial services. The next release in the product roadmap shows a Release 19 Innovation Pack to include a more configurable mobile, a disconnected mobile, chat (COD) and OPA (Oracle Policy Automation) integrationthereby opening up a suite of software products for more sophisticated modeling and business rules. Looking further ahead, Release 20 is scheduled to bring more incremental advancements including enhanced usability, analytics, mobility, hosted code and further vertical market depth. Despite being an Oracle branded product, CRM on Demand flies below the radar for far too many SaaS CRM buyers. Perhaps Oracle's messaging has gotten lost in the noise of its own company's announcements or within the deluge of provocative messaging from competitors such as Salesforce.com or NetSuite, or even the more focused messaging delivered by SAP with its Business ByDesign product. Whatever the case, the messaging needs clarity and amplification. While not needing to resort to guerilla marketing tactics already overused in the cloud market, the company does need to improve messaging and increase marketing promotion if it is too have any chance to gain ground on primary competitor Salesforce.com.

10