Oracle fuses CRM with OpenSocial, BlackBerry

Oracle hopes its customers will combine the company's latest On Demand CRM solution with social networking sites to close more deals. It also announced support for the BlackBerry and iPhone.

CRM On Demand now employs the Open Social API to keep its users up-to-date with information from their "friends" on social networking.

Oracle was a founding member of the Open Social alliance.

"People are choosing to document their lifestyle and relationships digitally," said Anthony Lye, Oracle's senior VP for On Demand, in Sydney today. "We spent a lot of time defining Open Social".

The Open Social feature can be configured to update the user's address book automatically with any new information posted on social networking sites, according to an Oracle spokesperson.

The content in release 15 of On Demand accesses "not just a bunch of static content" but information that "changes when people change", Lye said.

He said social networks broaden the reach of sales people by allowing them to see which major decision makers have relationships with people they already know.

"People are starting to do business more and more with people they like," Lye said.

Simon Banks, Oracle's general manager for CRM On Demand Asia Pacific, said that when he was trying to close a deal with a bank, all of the board members were on LinkedIn. He sent an invitation, which they accepted, and the relationship went from there.

Lye agreed there will be some fatigue on the part of decision makers if while using social networking sites they receive multiple invitations. "We're not saying that just by integrating everybody accepts." However, he said that getting to know someone through another trusted person is different from spam, and that there was value in just finding the person.

Apart from accessing information from social networks, users of the On Demand product can also access RSS feeds and widgets for news and blogs -- as they would with Web based portals such as iGoogle. Alternatively, they can have leads or top accounts put into a feed on their favourite portal.

Receiving up to date information from the feeds can help salespeople close sales, said Lye.

"CRM in general is a flat, one dimensional thing. What we wanted to do is try and give CRM a pulse," he said, adding that Oracle has tried to "tie the application into the very fabric of the Internet".

The new system also incorporates "Sticky Notes" and a messaging centre to allow the sales force to collaborate on deals.

On Demand Release 15 is very popular with sales people, according to Lye, who said that users were spending 38 to 65 percent of their work time in it, as opposed eight to 10 percent with previous applications.

Rival Sage is also taking its CRM package into the social realm.

Going mobile with BlackBerry, iPhone
Oracle also launched a "Mobile Sales Assistant" for CRM today, which works on the BlackBerry and will soon be available on Apple's iPhone.

"The idea was to build a natural extension of On Demand," Lye said.

If a salesperson finds their meeting is cancelled, the system can mash their sales lead data with a map to see if there are any alternative prospects that need a visit close to their current geographic location -- so they don't waste their journey

At the moment, Mobile Sales Assistant is only available on the BlackBerry. "We saw on our analytics an opportunity for the higher end sales professional," Lye said. "When we asked those people what devices they used, BlackBerry was the most dominant by far," he said, but Apple's iPhone was in second place.

There are plans to have a version available for the Apple iPhone, said Lye, but he didn't yet have a release date. Even though [the iPhone] is not yet available in Australia, many people already sport one, Banks said.

"I have one. It's the most beautiful thing we've ever seen," Lye added.

Author: Suzanne Tindal @ ZDNet.com.au

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Sun's MySQL Will Continue Oracle Relationship

Despite a new owner and the potential for more competition in the future, MySQL and Oracle will continue to work together.

When MySQL AB was bought by Sun Microsystems (NSDQ: JAVA), some knowledgeable observers said the first thing Sun would do is make MySQL free of its dependence on Oracle (NSDQ: ORCL).

MySQL incorporated the InnoDB transaction storage system as part of its database system, then Oracle acquired its Finnish parent company, Innobase Oy, in October 2005. "Look for Sun to do more and more to make MySQL free of any third parties," said Raven Zachary, open source analyst with the 451 Group, in an interview at the Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco.

But Zack Urlocker, the executive VP of products, who supervises both engineering and marketing at MySQL, says such independence is still viewed as unnecessary inside Sun. Urlocker appeared on a panel on the state of the open source database market. Seated nearby was Ken Jacobs, VP of product strategy at Oracle.

MySQL's strength has been in its ability to serve Web pages, and many Web applications are built with MySQL as the database of choice in the background. Oracle aspires to be the database of future applications as well, including Web applications, and it's conceivable the two eventually will come into more direct competition.

But Urlocker says that doesn't mean MySQL can't keep using InnoDB. "We've always had a very good relationship with Oracle," he said after the panel concluded.

"It's absolutely a fact. We've always had a very good relationship," affirmed Jacobs, one of the original employees of Oracle, who helped establish Oracle with the federal government from its new Washington office in 1981.

MySQL isn't ready to announce anything yet, but the way Urlocker and Jacobs exchanged meaningful glances, it was as if to say they're ready to sign a multiyear continuation of their agreement.

Meanwhile, another third-party piece of software on which MySQL used to depend, the SolidDB for MySQL that was under the sponsorship of IBM (NYSE: IBM), has been pushed off to SourceForge. Dhiren Patel, IBM's community relations manager for the overall SolidDB project, announced that IBM had acquired SolidDB in December for its in-memory database, technology that will help it compete with Oracle TimesTen.

"This in-memory technology, and not Solid's open source offering, was the key driver behind IBM's acquisition. As a result, I regret to inform you that, effectively immediately, we will not be continuing further development on SolidDB for MySQL," he wrote March 3, six days after Sun completed the MySQL deal.

The open source community around SolidDB for MySQL will be free to continue work on the project, and the developer forums and bug tracking have been migrated to SourceForge as well, Patel noted.

Urlocker said both Jacobs and Charles Phillips, Oracle's president, have assured him of continued, unfettered access to InnoDB. MySQL, initially developed as a read-only database, gets its key transaction handling characteristics from InnoDB and SolidDB for MySQL.

Author: Charles Babcock @ www.informationweek.com

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Will Oracle Cut Deals to Boost Earnings?

A head of a consulting firm that helps Oracle customers cut licensing deals with the enterprise software giant said Friday that fallout around Oracle's recent earnings announcement could help clients out at the bargaining table.

"If Oracle is posting fantastic numbers and growth, they tend to play hardball," said Ed Ramirez, president of Software Licensing Consultants, a San Ramon, California, firm. "If earnings are weak, perception is weak, that's good for end users and customers."

Oracle said Wednesday that its third-quarter revenues were up 21 percent to US$5.3 billion compared to the same quarter last year. On the surface, the numbers looked strong, especially in light of the widespread malaise in the U.S. economy, but Oracle still fell slightly short of analysts' estimates and its stock dropped in subsequent days this week.

But Eliot Arlo Colon, president and chief operating officer of Miro Consulting, an Oracle license consulting firm in Fords, New Jersey, didn't go quite as far as Ramirez. "It provides notice to clients that there's a weakness with Oracle," he said. "It gets them excited that maybe there's a possibility for a bigger discount. I don't know if that will play to getting huge concessions from them. It's still a case-by-case basis."

For its part, Oracle downplayed the results and said investors could expect a stronger fourth quarter. During a conference call Wednesday, the company president, Charles Phillips, said "a lot of people have annual buying cycles around our Q4. Customers think they're going to get a better deal if they wait until Q4."

But will they? The answer isn't clear-cut, according to Ramirez and Colon.
For example, while there might be a rush of discounting at the end of the fiscal year, it's difficult to predict how much, Ramirez said: "Everything is triggered by sales people not hitting their quota. In turn, their management doesn't hit their number. That is what triggers it -- it's not necessarily that Oracle as a corporation says, 'We need to do this.' It's a trickle-up effect."

Ramirez, who worked as an area sales manager at Oracle, added that the company can make concessions to customers beyond discounts, such as on various terms and conditions.

Colon offered a different caution, saying that there's far more competition for discounts during such rush periods.

"It's becoming more public that Oracle only has so much bandwidth to process larger deals at the end of the year. The message coming from Oracle field reps now is, 'Don't wait until the end of May, because I won't be able to get you the aggressive discounts.'"

"Once one big deal closes, a sales team may have hit their number and [other customers] get kicked to the second tier," he added. It might be wiser, he said, to "be the first in line, have a good story and play to the weakness of Oracle, which is that they have so many people waiting until the end of the year."

Nailing down a huge influx of complicated licensing deals can be overwhelming, even for a company the size of Oracle, Colon said. "For the first time this year, I was seeing six-figure deals missing the quarter because there wasn't enough time. That never happened in the past."

However, Oracle's sales representatives on the whole have been hard bargainers recently, Ramirez said.

"With all the acquisitions [Oracle has made] a lot of times they realize, 'Where is the customer going to go? What are their options? Before, there was a lot more competition. That's the attitude. 'Where are you going to go? We've got you.'"

Colon agreed that Oracle's buying spree has changed the landscape, but from a different perspective. His firm is now seeing clients order nothing for several months, but then buying up a slew of products at once.

"I've never seen that take off as much as it has in the last six months," Colon said. "The positioning from Oracle from all these acquisitions is, 'Now is the time to bundle and get all these things together.'"

On the flip side, customers are being emboldened, he said. "I'm seeing people asking for higher discounts and an overall lower price because they're dealing with one vendor."

Author: Chris Kanaracus @ IDG News Service

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