Last week I had the opportunity to chat with Oracle Sr Vice President, CRM Applications Anthony Lye about the new release of the Oracle CRM On Demand product. For quite a while I have thought that Oracle's flexible approach in both deployment and licensing models was a win for customers. This new release reenforces the flexibility message as well as offering some new features that should be of interest for customers and prospects.
What do I mean by flexibility? First there's choice of consumption model, on demand, on premise or both (using Oracle Application Integration Architecture). Then there's flexibility inside of the on demand choice, customers can deploy in single tenant (dedicated infrastructure) or multi-tenant (shared infrastructure) while still taking advantage of the subscription licensing approach. Oracle also has taken a different approach than most other SaaS vendors by pre-building custom objects and allowing an unlimited number of custom objects that allow customers to customize the on demand CRM software as well as configure or extend (by building custom apps or functions on a PaaS solution). This allows users to deploy custom business processes and integrate easier with other systems to increase productivity while still allowing Oracle to easily manage and upgrade the on demand app. So with Oracle CRM On Demand you can customize, configure or extend your SaaS solution.
As far as a new releases go, Oracle has added several new or updated solutions to the product portfolio. For the CRM On Demand R16 Oracle added three new industry solutions, Insurance, Wealth Management and Life Sciences; more core CRM functionality including integrated call center and enhanced analytics; more language support; a single tenant version; and more pre-built custom objects. On the interoperability front Oracle released AIA integration between CRM On Demand and the JD Edwards Enterprise One solution. Productivity enhancements included the release of Oracle Self-Service E-billing On Demand and Oracle Sales Library which is an answer to salesforce.com's CRM Content solution and incorporates many Web 2.0-like features to increase sales effectiveness by providing the best content to sales personnel. On the partner management side there is a PRM On Demand release as well as fully integrated Oracle Deal Management On Demand for partner deal reg and management.
Oracle is clearly focused on competing directly with salesforce.com and in this release, beyond the above listed enhancements and new apps, the pricing model for the new CRM On Demand Single Tenant Standard Edition demonstrates this fact. Instead of pricing the solution in what is a fairly "normal" approach among SaaS Apps vendors of a base price for core functionality and an add on price for each advanced feature set, Oracle offers its solution in a single per user per month price. This provides a healthy cost savings for customers that use more than the core CRM features (most enterprise customers, for example).
