Polkomtel Selects Oracle to Enhance Customer Experience

Leading Polish Mobile Provider Selects Oracle's Siebel CRM and Oracle Communications Service Fulfillment Suite to Improve Automation and Customer Experience.

Oracle today announced that Polkomtel, a leading mobile provider in Poland, has selected Oracle's Siebel CRM, Oracle® Communications Order and Service Management, Oracle Communications Service Activation and Oracle Communications Inventory Management to help improve operational efficiency, enhance customer service and enable rapid deployment of next-generation services.

In order to maintain its competitive advantage in Eastern Europe's growing communications industry, Polkomtel is focused on driving innovation, enriching its product offering, improving customer care and increasing operational efficiency. To help meet these goals, Polkomtel will replace its inflexible legacy provisioning systems with an automated mobile provisioning system built on the Oracle Communications Service Fulfillment Suite. In addition, Polkomtel will implement Siebel CRM to manage and track all customer interactions, empowering customer service and sales representatives to provide a more personalized, satisfying customer service experience. Polkomtel expects to achieve improvements in its day-to-day operations that will have a positive impact on operational efficiency as well as increases in average revenue per user (ARPU).

"We chose Oracle's mobile provisioning solution and Siebel CRM due to their rich, out-of-the-box functionality and ability to help us accelerate service delivery and reduce time to revenue," said Konrad Kobylecki, chief operating officer, Polkomtel. "The integration with Siebel CRM will provide additional benefit by helping to further streamline the order-to-fulfillment and issue resolution processes."

"Poland is experiencing extremely high mobile subscriber growth and Polkomtel is at the forefront of innovation and customer service in the region," said David Sharpley, vice president of product marketing and channels, Oracle Communications. "Polkomtel's selection of Oracle's end-to-end and integrated communications application suite will enable Polkomtel to continue its growth with improved efficiency and enhanced customer service."

Siebel CRM enables organizations to transform the customer experience. Siebel CRM delivers comprehensive CRM capabilities, tailored industry solutions, role-based customer intelligence and pre-built integration that provide a highly responsive, fully integrated client view across all channels.

The Oracle Communications Service Fulfillment suite automates the entire provisioning process in an integrated manner including order management, inventory and service activation. Oracle Communications Order and Service Management coordinates the many diverse tasks that make up the end-to-end service fulfillment process, including installing equipment in a point of presence, triggering billing once the service is activated in the network and coordinating processes between engineering and operations. Oracle Communications Service Activation manages the activation of complex services in a flow-through manner across multiple technology domains, reducing deployment costs and significantly increasing agility. Oracle Communications Inventory Management enables tracking of all network resources ranging from physical equipment to network locations and addresses, and supports end-customer services and network technologies.

Source: www.crm2day.com

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Oracle and Accenture integrate Oracle Fusion Middleware software

Oracle and Accenture have integrated Oracle Fusion Middleware into Accenture Communications Solutions, Accenture's suite of business offerings and assets designed to mitigate the risk of deploying, and reduce the time to deploy, OSS and BSS software applications.

Oracle Fusion Middleware is a pre-integrated portfolio of customer-proven software that spans from portals and process managers to application infrastructure and business intelligence.

The newly integrated capabilities are intended to further enable communications service providers to rapidly launch new services and reduce the inherent risks - such as exceeding project budget or project time limits - which can be associated with new software implementations. Now that Oracle Fusion Middleware is integrated into Accenture's Communications Solutions, it can serve to further expand a service providers's ability to bring services to market more quickly.

Accenture is also adopting Oracle's Application Integration Architecture for Communications to deliver additional solutions for the communications industry. Delivered through Accenture Communications Solutions, Accenture intends to leverage these pre-built software products that will enable service providers to bring services to market more quickly, identify new revenue streams through enhanced data analysis, and capitalize on new opportunities by rapidly adapting streamlined business processes.

Source: www.cbronline.com

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Salesforce.com shopping itself to Oracle?

Tom Foremski is reporting that a "reliable source" indicates that "Salesforce.com has approached Oracle to gauge if there is any interest in a sale at $75 a share."

At first glance it would appear strange for Marc Benioff, who has long trumpted his software-as-a-service (SaaS) model as the "death of software," to be offering his firm for sale by to the world's second largest enterprise software vendor.

But Foremski thinks the deal makes sense for several reasons. Apart from the obvious synergies of Oracle's market presence with Salesforce.com's technology, he also points out that Benioff appears to be losing interest in his current job and has been selling an enormous number of shares recently. He also speculates that Benioff would make a great candidate to replace Ellison, whenever Larry sees fit to retire.

My take
There was a time when I would discount rumors such as this one. But after watching Oracle for the last five years, I rule nothing out.

It would certainly launch Oracle to the front of the on-demand market. Oracle's only true multi-tenant SaaS offering is the online CRM offering it picked up from Siebel, which was a fraction of the revenue from Siebel's on-premise product line. Oracle's main on-demand offering is simply its traditional E-Business Suite, offered on a single tenant hosted basis. Oracle has been touting this model as superior to the multi-tenant model lately, but to me it smells of "if you can't fix it, feature it."

There's one other big plus for Oracle. Buying Salesforce.com would take the wind out of the sails of SAP's recent launch of its own on-demand offering, Business by Design. With SAP making such a strong move into the SaaS market, can Oracle afford to appear as a laggard?

Update, Feb. 12: Salesforce.com's share price was up nearly 8% yesterday on the rumor of its interest in a deal with Oracle.

Upon further consideration, however, it seems to me there are two possibilities, both of which are problematic:

1. Contrary to Foremski's assertion, the source is not reliable. The rumor could be a ploy by someone interested in pumping up the share price.

2. Foremski's source is reliable. If so, and the source has factual knowledge of a $75 per share offer from Salesforce.com, then the source is disclosing insider information.

Either way, the SEC should investigate.

Source: http://fscavo.blogspot.com

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