First Niagara Financial Group Selects Oracle CRM On Demand

Community bank will initially roll out product to all 114 bank branches.

First Niagara Financial Group (Lockport, N.Y.), a community-focused bank that provides financial services through 114 branches and four regional market centers across upstate New York, has selected Oracle (Redwood Shores, Calif.) CRM On Demand to address key sales and customer insight challenges the company faces.

The new Oracle CRM On Demand implementation will help deliver better cross-sales and up-sales by measuring overall revenue and number of products sold over time, customer loyalty capitalization, better reaction to acquisitions and added lines of business, as well as increased visibility into customer profiles, trends and forecasts for higher customer satisfaction and new sales. First Niagara Financial Group will initially roll out Oracle CRM On Demand to all 114 bank branches, and plans to roll out to other regional offices in the future.

Source: Peggy Bresnick Kendler @ www.banktech.com

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Former Oracle apps development exec said to be joining SAP

John Wookey taking new job at Oracle arch rival, source says; SAP declines to comment. John Wookey, who left his position as senior vice president of applications development at Oracle Corp. last fall, is taking a job with Oracle's bitter rival, SAP AG, according to a source with knowledge of Wookey's plans.

SAP spokesman Saswato Das declined to confirm or deny the hiring of Wookey when reached on Monday. "We always want to inform our employees about any company news first," Das said. "We have nothing to say on this matter until we have a chance to brief our people."

Oracle officials didn't immediately return a message seeking comment on the matter, nor could Wookey himself be reached. It wasn't clear what his role at SAP would be.

Wookey was a key figure behind Oracle's long-percolating Fusion Applications strategy, which will combine elements of the vendor's various business software lines into a new suite. His departure from Oracle in October 2007 prompted questions about the status of the Fusion project, but the precise reasons why Wookey left haven't been publicized.

Since his departure from Oracle, Wookey has seemingly kept a low profile, perhaps due to a noncompete agreement. Meanwhile, Oracle still hasn't set a firm release date for the initial version of the Fusion suite, but company officials said in September that they hope to deliver the applications to early users before the end of next year.

The news of Wookey's apparent hiring by SAP prompted a thumbs-up from China Martens, an analyst at The 451 Group. Wookey "brings a wealth of ERP experience to SAP, both from his days at Oracle and at Ross Systems," Martens said. Ross Systems, an Atlanta-based ERP vendor, was acquired by Hong Kong-based CDC Corp. in 2003 and now is part of that company's CDC Software unit.

Author: Chris Kanaracus @ www.computerworld.com

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Oracle buys Tacit IP

Oracle has bought the intellectual property of Tacit Software and hired all of its software engineers. The terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Tacit is the company behind illumio, a SaaS collaboration and "expertise location" platform, and ActiveNet, an on-premises product with a similar purpose.

The system doesn't require users to maintain profiles; instead, a plug-in that is installed locally tracks their activity and builds a "dynamic, highly accurate profile of their expertise," according to the illumio website.

Oracle has bought the Tacit IP in order to boost its Beehive collaboration product, launched at its recent OpenWorld conference. Beehive combines features such as conferencing, email, calendaring, instant messaging and workspaces.

Author: Chris Kanaracus @ computerworld.co.nz

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