Oracle plans to release the latest version of
its customer relationship management application within the next
two months as part of an ongoing update of its E-Business
Suite.
Oracle CRM 11i10, Oracle's roughly annual applications update,
adds new features to the suite's sales, marketing, partner
relationship management and e-commerce modules.
Earlier this month, Oracle announced its forthcoming
supply-chain management update. Version 10 updates for Oracle's
other E-Business Suite applications, such as financials and human
resources management, will be announced in September and released
later in the year, according to a company spokeswoman.
Oracle's CRM update aims to more tightly connect sales to other
corporate operations, including marketing and partnering
activities. A new tool dubbed "audience workbench" allows managers
to create campaigns that use customer data to target a
specific audience.
One customer in the process of deploying version 9 of Oracle's
marketing application said he plans to quickly update to version
10. "The applications are young enough in the CRM modules that
every upgrade is a must-have upgrade," said Rob Bland,
vice-resident of finance and operations for language software firm
Fairfield Language Technologies.
Oracle's CRM functionality still lags behind that of market
leader Siebel, particularly in key vertical markets such
as financial services, but the company is closing the gap, analyst
firm Gartner said in a May research report.
IDC placed Oracle third in the worldwide CRM market in 2003
based on market share, trailing Siebel and SAP. Both IDC and
Gartner estimated Oracle's 2003 market share at about 5%, but the
company should be doing better, Gartner said, given Oracle's size
and dominant share of the enterprise database market.
Oracle does not break up its applications revenue by segment,
but CRM showed strong growth last year, according to John Wookey,
Oracle's senior vice-president of applications development. Wookey
oversees the sales and marketing lines of Oracle's CRM suite.
Oracle's applications revenue dropped 3% in its 2004 fiscal year,
which ended 31 May, but revenue from new licences grew
slightly.
Fairfield Language Technologies is among those expanding its
Oracle deployment. The company, best known for its Rosetta Stone
software, already uses Oracle's financial, supply-chain and
e-commerce software, and plans to go live on Oracle's marketing
software within the next few weeks.
Fairfield expects most of the return on investment for its
Oracle standardisation to come from its use of the marketing
technology, Bland said. He recently previewed Oracle's version 10
updates and likes the new version's advances in usability and
customer modeling. "We'll give ourselves a few months to stabilize
on 9, then upgrade," he said.
Stacy Cowley writes for the IDG News Service