Dears,
Oracle CEO Larry Ellison famously said in 2008, “Maybe I'm an idiot, but
I have no idea what anyone is talking about. What is it? It's complete
gibberish. It's insane. When is this idiocy going to stop?”He was referring to
the term “cloud computing”, which he said was silly, since it described
something that companies were already doing. He promised back then to make some
sort of Oracle “cloud computing” pronouncement, and so he has finally done.2011
Oracle Open World, Ellison unveiled Oracle’s public cloud service which will
run on the company’s Fusion software. Well, what he really unveiled was a new
functionality that would allow businesses to access custom-built applications,
or those crafted by Fusion, via the internet. That category of software is
known as cloud.
The CRM (customer relationship
management) market got a bit busier this month with the entry of Oracle's
long-awaited Oracle Fusion
CRM, which is also the foundation of Oracle's new Public Cloud.
As the latest entry in a very competitive market, Oracle will have to stand out
to get noticed. So how does it stack up against established offerings from the
likes of Microsoft, Salesforce.com and SAP? And perhaps more importantly for
Oracle's longtime customers, will Oracle Fusion CRM spell the end of CRM on
Demand, its existing cloud offering based on Siebel, and Siebel CRM?
"The Oracle cloud is a little different," said Oracle
CEO Larry Ellison when he introduced the product suite at the Oracle Open World
2011 user conference recently. The Oracle Public Cloud is both a platform
as a service and applications as a service, he explained."The key
difference is the Oracle Public Cloud is based on industry standards and
supports full interoperability with other clouds and your data center on
premise," he said. By standards, he primarily meant Java. Oracle's cloud
claims to run any app written in Java.
One of the main principles of the
Fusion Applications development effort was to bring the best ideas,
architectural patterns and business practices of all "legacy"
applications (eBusiness Suite, PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, Siebel CRM, Retek, and
so on) into the new suite. The trained eye will see typical 'Siebel patterns'
in Fusion CRM. On the other hand, the requirements for CRM have drastically
changed in the last years, so there are lots of new things as well. Siebel
customers have three options: Stay with their legacy application by upgrading
to the most mature version (Siebel 8.1.1); augment their existing legacy app
with new functionality offered by the Fusion Applications stack; or ditch the
legacy stuff and embrace the new Fusion world. Customers are given a option to run
a hybrid applications because Fusion Applications are designed from the ground
up to co-exist with Oracle's legacy apps. I believe that Siebel CRM is not
dead. Too many hours and dollars/Euros have been spent by customers in Siebel
projects to naively believe that they will just dump it all for version 1 of
Fusion CRM.While I usually don't do too much IT crystal balling, we should see
another decade of thriving Siebel projects, but there is a new flower in the
garden which we shouldn't neglect.
Oracle's application services
include Fusion CRM, Fusion HCM and Social Networks, while its platform services
include Java Services and Database Services – and to this Oracle added cloud
customer service with the acquisition of RightNow. Oracle claims, among
other things, that its Oracle Fusion CRM Cloud Service enables organizations to
combine customer and product master data information with all CRM processes –
which the vendor says is a first for cloud-based CRM solutions. Oracle also
claims that the service delivers a consolidated customer center for all CRM
business processes.
The Oracle Cloud offering is
based not on multi-tenancy, but on virtualization containers that allow
customers to seamlessly switch back and forth between the private and the
public clouds. A big
selling point for Oracle could be that the same Fusion middleware software sold
on-premises is available in the cloud and that the programming model for Oracle
Public Cloud is the same open standards-based languages of Java, BPEL and Web
services.
While Ellison announced a collection
of cloud services – 4 SaaS applications and 4 PaaS services – only a subset of
these appear on the cloud.oracle.com . Only
the company's database and Java services are shown as PaaS services, with the
already pre-existing CRM and human capital management as SaaS applications.
Oracle is paying great attention
in strengthening his CRM Portfolio with recent acquisations of
ATG,Inquira,Datanomics,Endeca and Fatwire in addition to RightNow. Its quiet
fascinating to see the CRM portfolio to grow beyond the conventional modules
and this gonna be most exciting time for all the CRM consultant to expand their
breadth of knowledge and ability to adapt to diversified technologies and
Standards
Loving P&C
DC*
Oracle's application services include Fusion CRM, Fusion HCM and Social Networks, while its platform services include Java Services and Database Services – and to this Oracle added cloud customer service with the acquisition of RightNow.
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