Oracle partner NetLedger is working on a major upgrade of the
Oracle Small Business Suite, adding a marketing application and
expanding the accounting options. The European launch of the online
applications suite meanwhile has been postponed until next
year.
Release 8.0 of the Oracle Small Business Suite is scheduled for
October and "rounds out the service", according to Jim LaBelle,
vice-president of marketing for NetLedger.
The main addition is a marketing application, something that was
missing in the Web-based applications suite that is aimed at
companies with up to 500 employees.
"We pretty much automate every part of an organisation, except the
marketing department. So with this next release you will see more
tools to help marketers do their job. Things like campaign
management and being able to segment customers and prospects and
target online campaigns from that and measure the results," LaBelle
said.
The online Oracle Small Business Suite is offered as a hosted
application and is a co-operative effort between Oracle and
NetLedger, a privately held company majority owned and chaired by
Oracle chairman and chief executive officer Larry Ellison.
Companies pay $100 (£65) a month for the first user and $50 a month
for each additional user. Chief competitors are Microsoft's
bCentral, Intacct and Intuit's QuickBooks online.
NetLedger is also adding midrange accounting features for more
complex companies, at the request of its customers, said LaBelle.
According to NetLedger, all of its approximately 5,200 customers
use the Oracle Small Business Suite's accounting and customer
relationship management features, with most using Web tools and Web
store.
NetLedger's customer numbers show a slowdown in new customer
acquisition. The company early this year said it had about 5,000
customers, 2,000 of which were added last year.
The upgrade is not a stab at a particular competitor, said LaBelle.
"We don't design our product with any one competitor in mind," he
added.
Oracle in January said the Small Business Suite would be introduced
in Europe in the second quarter of this year, starting in the UK.
Europeans were calling Oracle asking for the online applications
and were signing up for the US trial, Oracle said at the time.
However, international plans have been postponed because of
NetLedger's upgrade schedule, said Tim Payne, online services
marketing director for Oracle.
"The latest version of the Oracle Small Business Suite will be
localised for Europe once it is complete. The likely launch date
will be sometime in early 2003, beginning with the UK and with
other European countries to follow," Payne said.
"There are a number of things we want to have in place before we
launch in another market, for example localisation, distribution
and marketing. We don't want to fall into the trap of rushing to
launch our application and maybe not pleasing the market fully,"
added NetLedger's LaBelle.