Oracle Corp claims to have moved ahead of competitors such as Siebel Systems Inc, Vantive Corp and Clarify Inc with the fourth release of its customer relationship management applications, Oracle CRM 3i. The new release adds sales, service, call center and electronic commerce modules to the set, now 35 modules in total, and integrates into Oracle’s ERP back-end applications. It is due to ship in May.
Oracle is putting major resources into CRM, which has grown from a 25-person unit two years ago to 650 people now – almost a third of the 2,000 staff working on Oracle Applications as a whole. Last year it acquired Versatility Inc for $12m in cash to build up the call center capabilities. Version 3.0 began shipping in November, with 3i developed in parallel. It has around 150 customers.
The main additions to 3i include Oracle TeleSales, a telephony- enabled application for call center sales agents, a wireless Mobile Field Service application supporting handhelds, a Call Center Intelligence application for performance monitoring and management, and iBill and iPayment applications for e-commerce. Integration with Oracle’s own ERP applications is aleadt in place, and the company is set to launch an integration product for SAP AG’s R/3 next month, connecting up to around 40 of SAP’s BAPI application interfaces. Oracle plans to use advanced queuing, Java messaging and XML interfaces for its integration work, but isn’t looking to connect up to other packages beyond SAP.
According to Mark Barrenechea, senior vice president of CRM products division, Oracle’s nearest competitor, Siebel, is still a sales force automation company, with no support for e-commerce or integration with ERP systems. Vantive and Clarify will become niche players he says. Barrenechea says that two of the fab five consultants, one of them KPMG, have now signed up to sell services around the CRM modules. The second will announce in the next few weeks, and Barrenechea expects all five to be signed up within three months. He says that typical service costs are twice that of licensing fees, better he claims than the average five- to-one ratios of competitors.
