Oracle chief executive officer Larry Ellison said at the Oracle
AppsWorld Conference this week that for users the installation of
the Oracle E-Business Suite 11i has enabled companies to automate
and improve processes and, in some cases, start to achieve a return
on investment.
Complete customer interactions go beyond CRM applications to other
systems, such as finance, and the data is scattered in multiple
places through the enterprise.
"One thing we focused on is reducing the cost of the implementation
and trying to make it predictable [so we can] tell you before we
begin how much it will cost to run it every day," Ellison said.
Brad Snook, vice-president of client relationship management at
United Assets Coverage, says moving to a hosted version of 11i CRM
call centre, finance and other applications saved his company more
than $3m (£1.8m) in efficiency increases over the course of a
year.
UAC previously ran a hodgepodge of applications, including business
applications from Microsoft Great Plains. The company moved to 11i
in August 2001, a single integrated contracts, billing and CRM
platform, which boosted the efficiency of call centre workers and
enabled them to handle more calls.
"Providing complete total cost of ownership [numbers] for all new
deals will be hard to do, but it's doable," said Joshua Greenbaum,
an analyst at Enterprise Applications Consulting.
"I think it's going to be an important competitive advantage that
will force the other vendors into promoting better understanding of
the lifetime costs of their software."