Oracle Corp is making its promised move into sales force automation (CI No 3,223) with an expansion of its Front Office Application Suite, through which it integrates sales and marketing information with data from its core manufacturing and finance applications. IT has added new Sales and Service Analyzer modules along with a new Oracle Call Center Suite. The analytical applications, due to be shipped in the second half of 1998, automatically collect customer information from Oracle Finance or Oracle Manufacturing applications, and from other Front Office applications. This can be viewed through the new Call Center software, which Oracle claims is the only one to provide full integration with a range of business applications. Oracle says it is working further with call center vendors to integrate Oracle Call Center with multi-vendor automatic call distribution and PBX products.
