Kudos to Oracle

Would you believe somebody in the industry media is giving Oracle kudos. Really. It says it right there in the first line: “…kudos to Oracle.” The piece comes out of CRMBuyer, whose Denis Pombriant attended the Oracle Open World user conference in San Francisco this week. (It’s all over now, guys, sorry…) A Pombriant story entitled “Oracle’s place in the transitioning CRM world” is a take on the big firm’s success.

“It is mind-boggling to think that the 40,000 people in San Francisco represent only a small portion of the people all over the planet who know the company’s products and use them in mission-critical business processes every day,” writes Pombriant, going on to state that “More than that, it is a tribute to one man’s vision of what information technology needed to become that started more than 30 years ago.”

As Pombriant sees it, Oracle is really two businesses at this point – stacks and applications – and both businesses are facing massive challenges thanks to changes in the industry due to on-demand computing. “I don’t think I would want to be running Oracle at this juncture,” muses Pombriant.

According to the CRMBuyer guy, the problem for Oracle is that “The on-demand customer today hardly knows — or cares — what’s behind the application service that is running in the browser, and that’s equally true of the operating system and server hardware.” Oracle is certain to be undermined by low-cost providers and/or on-demand solutions providers. Pombriant’s solution? Oracle should take a more aggressive position on providing infrastructure for on-demand.

Oracle? More aggressive? (Wait – do you hear that? That “doo doo doo doo”? That’s the “Twilight Zone” theme.)

Addressing applications, Pombriant sees the same bugaboo most in the biz do: namely, the motley collection of applications that Oracle has amassed in its bid of the past few years to buy, buy, buy first and ask questions later. For Pombriant, it’s “a flawed policy to build a platform — i.e., Fusion — that knits them all together.”

Pombriant brings it all around rather nicely (hey, that’s why they pay him the big bucks, right?) with Geoffrey Moore’s theories on business evolution: “…contemporary CRM was made for the part of the lifecycle that Geoffrey Moore called the ‘tornado’ phase … We are now living in a phase that Moore dubbed ‘Main Street,’ and the tools needed for selling, marketing and service on Main Street are vastly different from what we now have. …While paying attention to the customer and the customer’s experience are valid and important … the juxtaposition of the words and the late 20th century applications seemed strained.”

Unfortunately, Pombriant ruins an otherwise top-notch piece with a little transparent politicizing regarding members of the Bush and Clinton power bases – I mean, families. It’s a silly comparison that doesn’t work here. It’s funny, because while Pombriant talks about American presidents, he’s giving “Oracle credit for bringing together Peoplesoft and Siebel. In only a few months, they have made three disparate companies with different cultures work together…” Interestingly, citizens of the former Yugoslavia today say the same thing about General Tito.

Denis Pombriant’s “Oracle’s place in the transitioning CRM world” can be read in its entirety at either CRMBuyer or E-commerce Times.