Oracle opens a bit, agrees with Open

Ever so slowly is Oracle revealed information about its new customer relationship management strategy. Following completion of the Siebel acquisition, Oracle EMEA CRM John Simpson told SiliconRepublic.com editorial that there would be no forced upgrades to new technology as a result of the deal. Again, Simpson pushed the more headline-grabbing aspects of the plan, i.e. the claim to be the leading CRM provider worldwid.

“We’re the number one CRM vendor with five million live users, which for me is the best measure of success,” he said. Oracle also claims 150 million registered self-service users since the integration of Siebel was completed across the entire company as of June. Siebel CRM is theoretically to be the centerpiece of the Oracle Fusion CRM Applications strategy, with integration of the Oracle E-Business Suite and the Siebel, PeopleSoft Enterprise and JD Edwards EnterpriseOne CRM products already underway. Simpson went on to say that Oracle would continue development in all CRM product lines acquired. “We’re going to keep investing in PeopleSoft and Siebel,” he said. “We have allocated development teams to continue to take those products forward in future versions.” He added, “There will be no dramatic change.” Naturally, Salesforce.com, Oracle’s Moriarty (or Sherlock, depending on how one looks at it), entered the conversation. Simpson said that Oracle was addressing the on-demand CRM model pioneered by Salesforce.com.

“I will acknowledge that another vendor [guess who] has helped define the on-demand market … but we’ve overtaken them in terms of product capability.” Meanwhile, Oracle also announced amid its recent deluge of press releases a new partnership. Oracle and enterprise content management software producer Open Text representatives sent out the news that Open Text will offer content management solutions on the Oracle Content Database infrastructure software. This partnership extends Open Text’s recently launched enterprise solutions framework and hopes to build on the existing database integration that Open Text has with Oracle.

Open Text plans to offer its content-enabled industry applications, such as accounts payable and loan origination, on Oracle Content Database. Open Text also plans to extend Oracle products with existing technology for imaging, IDARS, records management, archiving and search. The theory here is that users are expected to access and manage content from Oracle, Siebel, PeopleSoft, and JD Edwards applications, aside from mere Oracle Fusion Applications. The ultimate goal, of course, is compliance with Fusion in that hazily defined time of 2008 full Fusion integration. “Open Text’s decision to offer content-based solutions on top of the Oracle Content Database platform fully validates our strategy for managing unstructured information in the Oracle Database,” claimed Oracle database server technologies senior vice president Andy Mendelsohn. Oracle Content Database and Oracle Records Database are options for Oracle Database 10g Enterprise Edition.

These are reportedly the first content and records management solutions capable of managing the diverse data and metadata in a single database; the programs are built on the Oracle Database 10g. Open Text is a provider of enterprise content management solutions that supports twenty million seats through 13,000 deployments in 114 countries and twelve languages worldwide.