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Oracle CRM: It Will Always Be About the Customer
By Cheryl Greggans

The old adage about how much more effort is required to keep a customer than to make one is more relevant today than ever before—but the leading CRM software vendors have joined up to make it easier.

Companies today are refocusing their efforts on customer retention, but in the process they are finding themselves face-to-face with big challenges. Lack of customer data, inconsistent delivery channels, price-based competition, marketing collateral overload, customer attrition, inefficient service processes, and inaccurate customer segmentation all contribute to keeping companies from capitalizing on customer loyalty and turning existing cost centers into profit centers.

The Next Generation of CRM Solutions
CRM customers are looking to the promise of next-generation CRM solutions, which, according to research firm IDC, is the largest and fastest-growing of all the major segments of the enterprise applications business, expected to grow by more $2 billion to $10 billion by 2009.

These new solutions offer smarter business processes; proactive customer interaction in call centers, Web sites, and other channels; and intelligent call routing and service management, among other features. Most importantly, they offer in-depth reporting on what's driving customer decisions. This information is of intense interest to call centers, which want to use this real-time customer data to customize offers or cross-sell and up-sell during customer interactions.

A Winning Combination
That's why Oracle's recently completed acquisition of Siebel Systems, Inc. is proving so timely. The combination adds a full range of award-winning next-generation CRM products and expertise to the Oracle portfolio, including

• The most deployed, comprehensive, and flexible CRM applications,
  including industry-specific, customer-facing applications combined with rich analytics that will serve as the centerpiece of the CRM strategy for Oracle Fusion Applications.
• Customer-centric industry solutions through integrated business processes that combine leading front-office, back-office, and industry solutions and allow quick adaptation to rapidly changing business environments and simplified IT infrastructures.
• Oracle CRM On Demand, the industry-leading hosted CRM solution, is the ideal solution for organizations looking to embark on a customer-centric strategy. It offers rich, comprehensive functionality that lets small-to-midsize businesses easily deploy additional sales, marketing, and service functionality as they build out their customer-centric enterprise.
• Comprehensive business analytics for greater business insight that combines Siebel CRM analytics, Oracle ERP analytics, and industry-specific analytic content. These analytics will give businesses the ability to monitor, analyze, and act on real-time intelligence while providing a single, companywide view of operations and financial performance.
• A superior ownership experience based on flexibility and customer choice through the most comprehensive offering of on-demand and on-premise solutions available today. This allows for choice in procuring, developing, implementing, and deploying business applications.
• Lifetime product support and continued development of existing CRM products, including Siebel version 7.8, the upcoming version 8 of the Siebel major product lines, and future versions. Oracle also plans to offer customers an integrated suite or best-of-breed Siebel CRM solution, as well as a path to the next generation of standards-based applications, Oracle Fusion Applications.
• Proven expertise in enabling customer success through blueprints and roadmaps, deep insight, and the largest dedicated and certified consulting ecosystem.

Shared Architecture, Shared Success
Siebel's CRM and Oracle's enterprise applications and middleware share an architecture built on industry standards, so Oracle's development organization can enhance Siebel's CRM product set, ensuring continued customer success, according to Ed Abbo, senior vice president, CRM Development, Oracle.

"The product synergies and greater resources gained through the combination will be more effective in providing high-quality, leading-edge solutions that will help customers protect, extend, and evolve their current investments," he explains. "Siebel combines leadership in CRM with next-generation analytics solutions. Now we're helping customers take the next step by leveraging these investments, turning their customer–facing channels into instruments for revenue growth and customer retention."

Customers, such Horizon Healthcare Senior Vice President Patrick Geraghty, seem to agree. "The combination of Siebel and Oracle will provide the continued commitment to the products that have allowed us to be responsive to the needs of our customers-edge technology from a company that has the resources to be there when you need them most".

 Find out more about Siebel's CRM products and solutions:
Find out more about Oracle's commitment to supporting its customers:
Find out more about the continued success of Oracle and Siebel:
See what analysts are saying:
See what customers are saying:
See what partners are saying:
Cheryl Greggans is an independent business writer.
 

From CRM to the Customer-Centric Enterprise
By Cheryl Greggans

After years of cost cutting and downsizing in an unstable marketplace, the enterprise agenda is changing. Seeing a stronger global economy, executives over the last few years have again focused on growth. According to the 2004 IBM Global CEO survey, 80 percent of CEOs at the world's major companies said their primary business objective has shifted from cost-cutting to revenue growth.

A key driver of growth across all industries is customer loyalty—which is why the idea of a customer-centric enterprise (CCE) has become so compelling. The CCE builds on loyalty by digging deeper into customer relationships, understanding what customers need, and maximizing those relationships by providing it. The goal is to retain the customer in an ongoing relationship that results in greater wallet share.

Leaders or Laggards?
Most enterprises today are built around departmental and organizational silos that don't present a single face to the customer. Instead, there are many inconsistent, disconnected, and inefficient processes that use different infrastructures, have different contact methods, and don't share data. These processes break at departmental boundaries and do not provide an optimal customer experience. Instead they are focused on the specific goals of a given department, which may conflict with the goals of the company and its customers. In the end, people working in such processes may not even collect the data necessary develop insights about customer satisfaction and retention.

But enterprises and research institutions alike are realizing the importance of putting customers first. Research from the Harvard Business School found that "companies that put customers in the center are six times more likely to achieve growth goals." A study conducted by the consulting firm Accenture shows that 40 percent of growth and 38 percent of shareholder value is derived from customer loyalty. And a 2005 loyalty report from the Peppers & Rogers Group indicates that fostering customer loyalty improves corporate results, and that "loyalty leaders generate operating margins of 13 percent versus the 2 percent generated by loyalty laggards."

The Next-Generation CCE
One way to meet the challenges of a strengthening economy, including increased competition and regulation, is to focus on becoming a true CCE that empowers employees with customer data and insight through end-to-end business processes. In a CCE, employees make the right decision for the company and for the customer at any customer moment of truth.

The key is being able to speak with "one voice" to customers by ensuring that current customer intelligence is built into every facet of the enterprise. Even the smallest, most isolated corner of the enterprise should know what processes to use, how to access customer data, how to recognize the warning signs of an unsatisfied customer, and what to do about it. According to Gartner, "customer-centric strategies should view the customer from a total lifecycle perspective, rather than a sales, service, or marketing perspective that leaves the rest of the company out. All areas of the company play a part: Those that do not serve a customer should serve another part of the organization that does."

Fortunately, the CCE evolution involves principles that are largely already in place in most organizations:

• Customer experience (CRM)—a seamless, unified experience for all customer interactions across all customer-facing organizations
• Business processes (BPM)—extending customer understanding throughout the enterprise, allowing all functional areas to make informed, customer-based decisions
• Analytics (BI)—transforming customer data into actionable information and getting the right information to the right person at the right time
• Real-time intelligence—a single, up-to-the-minute, enterprisewide view of the customer that can help organizations be flexible and respond to rapid change

A Sensible Solution
Oracle CRM solutions can help companies become more agile by bringing the voice of the customer into all aspects of the business and putting the entire organization on the same page. Regardless of where companies currently stand, Oracle can be a trusted advisor in helping them move toward becoming a CCE by tying all applications together in a sensible solution that protects investments, extends CRM implementations, and evolves to meet new demands.

CRM Software as a Service for Any Business
By John Papageorge

Rob Reid, Oracle vice president of Siebel's award-winning CRM software-as-a-service offering, says it's a challenge convincing customers that they can get a robust software solution for only $ 70 a month. "If you went to buy a fully loaded BMW listed for $10,000, you'd expect it to be low-end," suggests Reid. "When customers see the value and choice of our on-demand CRM solution and learn how quickly they can receive a significant return on their investment with Oracle, they really can't believe it."

Reid has discovered that those customers range from small-to-midsize businesses (SMBs) to large enterprise companies. "We've got everyone from Fortune 100s to people who sell baseball cards," says Reid. "The full spectrum of the economy is using these solutions."

The service was built by Siebel, "the company that created CRM in the first place," notes Reid. He points to Siebel's 12 years of experience and 4 million users as testament to the company's expertise in the area of CRM. Their experience has even led to vertical packaged solutions that efficiently meet the demands of specific customers and eliminate expensive customization.

Customers will find a variety of solutions at crmondemand.com, ranging from vertical packages for specific industries to highly tailored solutions for private environments. Reid expects demand to grow considerably, referencing statistics showing that software as a service is growing at over 105 percent a year.

"We've found that the on-demand model is very advantageous to SMBs with limited cash flow, but it's also appealing to Fortune 500s that want to adapt solutions more rapidly to their changing business," says Reid. "We offer a wide range of businesses more flexibility than they have had in the past."

Long-Term Relationship with Customers
Reid doesn't hesitate to express his opinion about competitors, such as Salesforce.com. According to Reid, there's a big difference between the companies: Oracle wants to provide business impact to establish a long-term relationship with customers, whereas Salesforce.com just wants to acquire customers.

"Salesforce spends 56 percent of revenue on sales and marketing and only 6 percent on R&D", says Reid. "We've invested over $2 billion in our technologies. Salesforce has been good at getting people to understand software as a service, but they are investing in the short term, going for customers instead of developing their solution and growing for the long haul."

Security and Ease of Use
Aside from the price, customers have also found a high level of security. " Security updates are added instantaneously to our on-demand CRM solution," Reid says. "And the On Demand group spends a lot of time working with Oracle's security team to refine security solutions."

Reid also believes that customers appreciate how easy it is to use the online application. He notes that the point-and-click user interface is as simple as configuring Outlook or a Web browser—and time saved means money saved. "For every dollar spent on an on-premise CRM application, two dollars go into configuring it," he says. "With Oracle's On Demand software, for every dollar you spend on it, you usually spend less than 10 cents configuring it."

For $70 a month, customers get new releases and subsequent increases in functionality added without added costs. In addition, Reid emphasizes that the service can be configured to perfectly align with the way customers interact with their end users. "The main thing is that this solution is flexible, low-risk, and has an immediate impact," says Reid. "Customers see a return on investment in just the first or second quarter they use it."

To find out more, go to crmondemand.com or call 1.866.906.7878.

Profit The Business Of Technology

       May 2006

Oracle Magazine

Customers are the true beneficiaries of the Oracle and Siebel union.

With 12 years at Siebel and, prior to that, 7 years at Oracle, Ed Abbo knows both companies intimately and understands how to succeed in either environment. "Over the past three or four years, I've been running the technology office and development for Siebel," Abbo explains. "I started off in the engineering organization, ran Siebel's technical field organization for a number of years, and then started up and ran the industry applications organization, when we launched CRM [customer relationship management] applications specific to industries such as financial services, consumer goods, pharmaceuticals, high technology, automotive, energy, public sector, and communications." Abbo's familiarity with the business applications ecosystem is so complete that the thought of the approximately 16,000 customers and more than 4 million deployed end users—making the combined companies by far the largest front-office packaged application provider—doesn't faze him.

Oracle's strategy—called protect, extend, and evolve—allows customers to protect the investments that they have made in Oracle applications, extend them with new Oracle Fusion-based capabilities, and finally evolve to the next-generation applications when it makes business sense for them to do so. "The key message is that the product strategy is sound, and it takes into account what customers are doing today—what their plans are in the medium term as well as the long term. The timing is also excellent, since both Siebel and Oracle are in the process of building next-generation applications," Abbo emphasizes.

One of the things that Abbo, formerly Siebel's senior vice president of development and now in charge of Oracle's CRM development team under Oracle Senior Vice President of Applications Development John Wookey, is clearly most excited about is the doubling of the CRM application-development capacity with the merger of the Siebel and Oracle CRM development teams. More developers means more people committed to innovating, listening to customers, and creating the best CRM products in the marketplace.

After Oracle and Siebel announced the agreement to combine their businesses, both companies' development teams began the process of product integration planning. The teams began the planning and analysis of the product sets, the technology underpinnings provided by Oracle's database and middleware, and identified the integration points between the CRM and enterprise resource planning (ERP) products and the technology backbone. "Because of this planning," says Abbo, "we were ready to go in March when the two teams could begin hands-on work."

During the next 12 months, the development teams plan to continue working on integrating Siebel and Oracle products to support end-to-end processes such as the opportunity-to-cash processes. In addition, the teams are planning to integrate the Siebel CRM OnDemand hosted offering with the Oracle, PeopleSoft, and JD Edwards products. Siebel products provide customers with unrivaled deployment flexibility; the same functionality is available as a hosted service or on-premise software.

Getting To Oracle Fusion

Oracle Fusion, Oracle's vision for next-generation enterprise technologies, applications, and services that will revolutionize business, is a familiar concept to Abbo. "Both Oracle and Siebel were already working on next-generation products at the time of the merger, and Oracle Fusion will allow us to deliver the next generation of CRM applications to the marketplace. It's very much in line with where Siebel was headed with our customer-adaptive applications. That is the ability for businesses to define very specific objectives for their interactions with their customers, model those in information technology, and drive their sales, service, and marketing organizations to deliver on those business objectives. Then, finally, businesses should be able to measure and monitor the effectiveness of the processes that they're implementing using embedded analytics applications," says Abbo.

Even better, the combination of the two companies is allowing Siebel CRM products to take real advantage of the Oracle technology stack in addition to other standards-based platforms.

Taking Care of Industries

Oracle has shown a commitment to industries by making sure the company, as well as its partners, is addressing the major industry-influenced technology challenges of its customers. The coming together of Oracle and Siebel is only further driving progress toward realizing that goal, especially with the focus that Siebel has had for years on core industries such as financial services (including insurance and banking), retail, manufacturing, and others. "We're bringing to the table deeper and broader industry-specific capabilities," says Abbo. "For example, in the financial services industries, we are enabling our CRM front-office solution to plug into a core banking system to help provide a complete end-to-end solution to the marketplace."

There are other examples—the Siebel applications offer 23 industry-specific versions and more than 100 industry-specific solution sets that enable streamlined business processes for numerous industries. "Our development team has worked very closely with customers in specific industries, and that has given us some great domain knowledge," says Abbo. "That's a huge benefit we bring to Oracle."

Robust Technology Platform

What Oracle offers is just as exciting. The Oracle technology stack, including Oracle Fusion Middleware (a portfolio of industry-leading, standards-based, and customer-proven software products that spans a range of tools and services including Java Platform, Enterprise Edition, and developer tools, integration services, business intelligence, collaboration, and content management) and Oracle Database, comprise a robust technology platform that is critical for delivering the kind of benefits that business applications users require. In addition, the comprehensive business analytics, the industry-leading capabilities for retail, financial services, and other areas, and the ease of integration promised by the combined development teams are huge benefits for all customers.

"Our technology teams at Siebel have been working very closely with the Oracle technology teams to look at the new capabilities we want to take advantage of and to deliver the most scalable, high-performance, and reliable applications to our customers," emphasizes Abbo. "As we move to plan our next generation of Oracle Fusion CRM capabilities, we now can work a lot more closely with the Oracle server technology teams to take advantage of capabilities in the database and the application server."

Oracle Delivers Unparalleled Innovation and Functionality in Oracle CRM On Demand Release 10
On April 19, 2006, Oracle announced the latest release of Oracle CRM On Demand, extending its industry leadership in CRM and On Demand.
Read the press release.

Gartner Positions Oracle's Siebel CRM Applications in Leaders Quadrant for CRM Customer Service Contact Center
Siebel CRM applications have been positioned in the Leader Quadrant of the 2006
Gartner Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Customer Service Contact Center Magic Quadrant. Read the full 2006 Gartner CRM Customer Service Contact Center Magic Quadrant report.

Independent Research Firm Ranks Oracle's Siebel Marketing as a Top Enterprise Marketing Platform for B2C and B2B Organizations
Forrester Research, a leading independent research firm, has recognized Oracle's Siebel Enterprise Marketing Suite as having the strongest product offering in the latest Forrester Wave Evaluation: Enterprise Marketing Platforms, Q1 2006.
Read the Oracle press release.

    The CRM Process: Its Measurement

   American Hotel & Lodging Association

  Oracle and Siebel

   Siebel Customer Relationship Management Applications

   See Siebel CRM In Action

From CRM to the Customer-Centric Enterprise

Siebel Real-Time Decisions

Does Your Service Strategy Deliver?  (.pdf  438 KB)

Oracle's Siebel Customer Relationship Management Applications help provide insight to the right person at the right time, leading to faster, better informed decisions. With solutions tailored to the specific needs of more than 20 industries, Siebel provides predictive analytics capabilities that deliver real-time intelligence, greater flexibility through support of both J2EE and .NET, and a lower total cost of ownership.

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