CRM Product Marketing Blog

Then I really don't want to waste your time.

However, if you ARE interested in increasing sales productivity at your company, I strongly encourage you to attend a free Webinar we're conducting with CRM magazine one week from today. The title of the Webinar is "Drive Increased Sales Productivity." It's taking place on Wednesday, December 9th at 11 a.m. Pacific time/2 p.m. Eastern time.

FULL DISCLOSURE
a) I thought of this topic;

b) I solicited and invited our panelist participants (with some help from teammate Tony Berk)--Kevin Raybon, General Manager, Sales Operations, NEC Unified Solutions; Paul Vinogradov, Vice President, The Alexander Group; Erica Ruliffson, Group VP, NA Strategic Accounts at Oracle;

c) I'm moderating the panel discussion;

Finally, I'm not blowing smoke here. We conducted a "get-to-know-you-rehearsal session" with these panelists nearly two weeks ago, and the level of dialog was mind-blowing...so much so that I've cajoled my teammates to stop posting on this blog for the next few days so I can give you even more information about this Webinar in coming days. One thing I'll tell you right now: we're not going to play the "Death by PowerPoint" routine. Rather, you can count on a lively and interesting conversation, and you'll have the chance to weigh in with your own questions. And yes, this one is 'live,' at least on Wednesday, December 9th at 11 a.m. Pacific time!

So what are you waiting for? Please click here to register.

Unlike other hosted CRM solutions, Oracle CRM On Demand Industry Editions are built upon Oracle's deep industry expertise -- providing organizations in the automotive, high technology, insurance, life sciences, and wealth management industries with tangible business value from the start. Oracle CRM On Demand Industry Editions feature pre-built business processes, data models, object models, and business logic designed to support the unique requirements of these industries. The results are:

• Faster time to business value
• Less customization
• Lower total cost of ownership (TCO)

So, organizations can deploy Oracle CRM On Demand Industry Editions with the confidence that their CRM solution is designed from the ground up for your industry requirements, complemented by one-stop support services for your business. That's why global leaders such as Bank of America, BT, and United Healthcare choose Oracle CRM On Demand Industry Editions. Find out more here.

"Before, we were unable to generate 80% of the reports that we do now. To generate the reports that were possible, it would take us several days of manual processes. With Oracle CRM On Demand, we can access 90% of the information we need in real time; and anything else we can pull within 24 hours. This is critical to enable our management team to make more effective decisions to grow our business." - Richard Barber, Director of Global Sales Operations, Celestica Inc.

Additionally, Celestica used Oracle CRM On Demand to automate several other sales processes, such as the sales incentive program. The result? Celestica shortened the approval and payment cycle from days to minutes. So, just imagine what Oracle CRM On Demand can do for your firm.

Read more in this new Oracle Customer Success Snapshot. To find out more about how Oracle CRM On Demand can produce stellar results for your firm, visit crmondemand.oracle.com.

In case you missed this CRM magazine webcast with DIRECTV, Oracle, AT&T, and Antenna Software, listen to the replay to learn how to:

• Plan, implement, and deploy a mobile CRM strategy


• Enable your sales force to achieve new levels of productivity and provide improved customer service


• Team up with solution providers that have the business and technical expertise to make your project successful

This webcast showcases DIRECTV's SaaS CRM implementation leveraging Oracle CRM On Demand combined with Antenna's mobile solution to provide area sales managers with the mobile tools they need to support 5000 dealers and provide the best level of customer service with no burden on IT resources. And, don't miss the engaging Q&A session at the end submitted by viewers like you!

Click here to learn more about Oracle CRM On Demand and how you can try this leading CRM SaaS solution for free.

SJ AB, the Swedish rail operator, knew competition was coming, since the market was being deregulated. So what did they do? They instituted a program to learn about their 2.5 million customers and focus on their key customers. To support that program, they implemented Oracle's Siebel CRM!

In this video, Claes Lindholtz, Director Customer Programs and Customer Analysis, discusses SJ's selection of Siebel CRM, the implementation and the results. Learn how SJ has increased customer satisfaction and ridership and prepared for continued growth.

To see other customer success stories, visit Siebel CRM Success.

Click here, to learn more about Oracle's CRM products.

Attend our live webcast for Health, Human Services, and Labor agencies.
Hear Adelaide O'Brien with IDC Government Insights and Kimberly Ellison-Taylor from Oracle's HHS practice discuss the latest trends in social services and customer success stories.

Register Now!

We have a new release within our CRM family here at Oracle. PeopleSoft CRM 9.1 was released a few days ago. This is the second release since Oracle acquired PeopleSoft.

PeopleSoft CRM 9.1 is designed to:

This new release has already been well received in the analyst community. Bill Band from Forrester Research says "Oracle is investing in the right things that customers care about: a "Web 2.0" user experience, collaboration tools, marketing and service functionality improvements, and making upgrades easier. I am sure the PeopleSoft fan club will be glad they now have a fully up-to-date CRM solution available to them.". For the entire Forrester report click here . For the press release click here.

Oracle CRM On Demand customers get the best of both worlds: a commitment to developing new versions of their existing software AND a commitment to developing new generations of software their organizations can use to drive customer effectiveness in new and compelling ways.

Thomas Kurian, Executive Vice President of Product Development, spoke with a global team of our Oracle CRM On Demand sales representatives about this very point recently.

Here is a brief audio excerpt.

The City Of Sacramento is becoming a model city for customer service.

Listen to how the City of Sacramento is using Oracle's solution for 311 as a front door to the city,
single point of contact for constituents and single source of truth for government.
Click here to read about Oracle's constituent services solutions.

Attend our live webcast for Health, Human Services, and Labor agencies.
Hear experts Adelaide O'Brien with IDC Government Insights and Kimberly Ellison-Taylor
from Oracle's Health & Human Services practice discuss the latest trends in social services
and customer success stories.

Register Now!

During Oracle OpenWorld, I spoke with Paul Akin from Odyssey HealthCare, one of the largest providers of hospice in the US.

Listen to Paul discuss Odyssey's implementation and success with Oracle CRM On Demand and Oracle Mobile Sales Assistant including increasing sales efficiency and reducing telecom and support costs.

Click here to read more about Odyssey HealthCare's CRM On Demand implementation.

Click here to learn more about Oracle Mobile Sales Assistant.

"Agencourt's sales team is very excited about Oracle CRM On Demand. They're eager to use it, which was a primary concern for us. To be successful with our CRM initiative, we needed to have the buy-in of our primary users." So said Rosa Cintron, Project Manager, CRM On Demand, Agencourt Bioscience Corporation.

Find out more about how Agencourt ensured project success and delivered business results in this customer snapshot.

PROBLEM: According to David Ferguson, "Striking a balance between collecting data from and returning useful information to the sales team has been at issue within companies engaged in deploying CRM applications. It was relatively easy to establish a perception of benefit with the sales management team... The trick was to convince the individual sales associate that the tool would make him or her more proficient in day-to-day selling."

SOLUTION: Social CRM applications give sales associates a reason to embrace their CRM applications. Read more about what David has to say here.

David Ferguson is a 2009 board member for the OAUG and is working as Director, Transformation Management Office, Global Customer Relations Management for Diebold Incorporated.

Oracle® Application Integration Architecture (AIA) Release 2.5 is the most extensive Oracle AIA release to date. With an increased focus on end-to-end industry solutions and pre-built integrations across virtually all major Oracle and non-Oracle applications, like SAP, Oracle AIA Release 2.5 helps organizations reduce business process integration complexity and accelerate delivery of enterprise application solutions with a proven and reliable SOA-based framework. Oracle AIA Release 2.5, with a total 30 PIPs and four Foundation Packs enables critical business processes across multiple industries, and reinforces Oracle's ongoing commitment to providing customers with integration solutions that can be extended and more cost effectively managed and sustained.

Oracle AIA Release 2.5 PIPs Related to Oracle CRM On Demand and Siebel CRM:
- Lead to Order: Oracle CRM On Demand to Oracle's JD Edwards World - provides data synchronization for Accounts, Contacts, and Products, integrating key information to support the Opportunity-to-Quote process.
- Order to Cash for SAP: Oracle Order to Cash for Siebel CRM and SAP - allows a seamless order-to-cash business process linking Quotes and Orders in Siebel CRM with Orders in SAP ERP.
- Customer Master Data Management for SAP: Oracle Customer Hub with SAP - supports delivery of customer data sync flows with SAP in addition to the Oracle E-Business Suite and Siebel CRM.
- Health Sciences: Oracle Remote Data Capture to Oracle's Siebel Clinical Trial Management System - synchronize study site information; automate patient enrollment tracking and study activity tracking for electronic data capture and clinical trials management systems.
- High Tech/Manufacturing: Siebel CRM to Oracle Incentive Compensation - provides a sustained integrated Oracle Application Integration Architecture based incentive compensation solution for the Siebel CRM install base including telcos and high-tech.

Read more here.

DIRECTV has extended its use of Oracle CRM On Demand by deploying Oracle Contact On Demand to improve support of DIRECTV dealers.

Building on years of improved sales productivity with CRM On Demand, DIRECTV identified the opportunity to expand their deployment to reduce response time and increase accuracy in support of their dealers.

"Oracle CRM On Demand has improved our sales processes and we continue to improve and accelerate our service to dealers, which allows them to spend less time working with us and more time with the customers, selling - a huge competitive advantage," said Erik Walters, project manager, sales operations, DIRECTV, Inc.

Click here to read more.

Companies are leveraging their indirect channels more than ever today. With reduced hiring and marketing budgets, indirect channels (partners) become a great way to increase your reach in the marketplace. The challenge for companies is to ensure that these partners are actually selling YOUR products. There is a resurgence in partner channels and PRM (Partner Relationship Management) solutions which are a platform for companies and partners to collaborate on.
Here is a new solution brief that discusses how you can maximize revenues through your partners and ensure that they stay motivated to sell your products and services. To learn more about Oracle's PRM solutions click here

To quote Charles Dickens, is it the best of times or the worst of times? Well, for leading sales executives there has never been a greater opportunity to convert their organization's top challenges into decisive opportunities they can leverage to gain measurable competitive advantage.

And just for you, we've identified these opportunities...six of them. And we've made it available for you in a highly compelling white paper. Fine print: If you DON'T think it's compelling, please let me know. I wrote it!

You can download it here. And while you're at it, please visit our new Web page built specifically for sales executives, at www.oracle.com/crm/salesexec.

How can sales representatives create and run their own targeted email campaigns? Field marketers have great tools such as Oracle CRM On Demand Marketing.

Now, Oracle CRM Sales Campaigns On Demand, an Oracle Social CRM product, enables sales users to quickly create and run their own demand generation campaigns. You can choose from among peers' most-effective campaign templates, saving time and increasing effectiveness, or create your own copy quickly. You can view results in real-time, with detailed insight on when an email is opened or clicked, cannot be delivered due to an invalid address, or when a user has unsubscribed. With powerful and easy adherence to compliance laws, you can readily honor customer preferences to opt-out of emails.

See Oracle Social CRM at work in this two minute overview video. Read more about how Oracle CRM Sales Campaigns On Demand helps you to fine-tune campaigns, turning more leads into opportunities while improving sales productivity.

Another Oracle OpenWorld has come and gone, but there was a lot of valuable information shared not only by Oracle experts, but partners and customers as well, that will continue to live on. If you were an OpenWorld Full Conference attendee and missed a session, you can catch an audio replay on OpenWorld On Demand. If you were not able to make it to OpenWorld, you can still access valuable information by signing up here for OpenWorld On Demand or by following this blog where we will give a recap of key sessions in future blog postings.

Also, check out some related articles posted by analysts and bloggers who attended OpenWorld:

• Denis Pombriant: At Oracle Open World



"In CRM kudos have go to Anthony Lye and his team for their top to tail work with the Siebel and CRM On-Demand suites and the dogged determination to prove the necessity - even desirability - of hybrid premise-based and on-demand approaches to CRM...The CRM team is bristling with innovations for large and small customers -announcing twelve new products, eighty customer driven enhancements, thirty-one new features, a REST API, CRM availability in Microsoft Outlook, and a new Siebel version coming this year."



• Paul Greenberg: Oracle OpenWorld 2009 - Social CRM Technology Rears an Actual Head



"... Oracle CRM stood far out far ahead of the rest of the Oracle Apps pack....CRM at Oracle seems to remain their star application, probably because it is, in 2009, the fastest growing application suite at Oracle and probably will be the Oracle revenue leader this year. That's because they've understood what businesses need when it comes to being successful with customers. "



• Esteban Kolsky: CRM at Oracle OpenWorld 2009: Improved with Room to Grow

"They showed stand-alone and mobile interfaces that were really innovative displays of data that were, well - not your traditional CRM systems. Very creative interfaces...Integration was the second area that has been overhauled. Cross-channel and Cross-function work has been improved by adding several ways to address the channels and each of the individual functions, making it easy to transfer data back-and-forth, and - more important keeping the state of the transaction throughout....a brand new set of solutions for Social CRM that leverage the model of implicit and explicit relationships that Siebel created in their Personas data model that treat Social Media as just channels."

Special thanks to everyone -- Oracle experts, partners, and especially our customers -- who helped make this an information-rich event!

Oracle CRM Moves Forward In Quality...And In Thinking

...what Anthony Lye, Mark Woolen, Christine Viera, Melissa Boxer and Adam May showed at an executive briefing yesterday on the advances in CRM was heartening because they are molding their CRM applications - traditional ones - with social and collaborative features that make them infinitely more valuable. Anthony Lye, SVP in charge of Oracle CRM and the intellectual driver for much of this, started off with a discussion on the idea of reinvention rather than recovery as the strategy that companies need to take aggressively during poor economic times. He then framed the soon to appear demos by talking about what he saw as 3 game changing strategies:

1. Executing the cross-channel customer experience flawlessly - Anthony distinguished between multi-channel and cross-channel (which was something like the difference between multigrain and whole grain) - multi-channel was a strategy that delivered an experience in mobile, field, community, call center etc. Cross-channel was a strategy to traverse all the individual channels at any given time by embedding processes to instrument business so that the customer experience was consistent. PG: While I thought the strategy was smart from a software and processes standpoint, I wasn't truly sure that cross-channel was that much different from what I know as multi-channel. But regardless, the idea of a consistent (though he didn't talk about authentic which is the companion piece of consistent when it comes to the customer experience) customer experience accessible whenever across channels was dead on.
2. Tap into the power of the social web - this is the one that goes without saying and is the technological and process driven aspect of how Social CRM works - though by no means all of it.
3. Deliver CRM data, when, how, and where users need it - this was the most interesting actually...

example: Swedish Rail Social Marketing iPhone App
What makes this application powerful is that it literally allows you use the points you have in a loyalty program to purchase items from Swedish Rail including tickets that are not only shipped right to your iPhone when you've used the points to buy them but can be redeemed via the iPhone. Additionally, you can make reservations directly and then have your itinerary delivered to your iPhone and if you choose to make it public so your friends (chosen friends) need to know where you are going - it can be delivered to Facebook for public or semi-public scrutiny. Swedish Rail then gets all this new data about your transactions and interactions and can use it to create targeted offerings on the spot.... read more

It may be the last day at OpenWorld for sessions, but there are still sessions left -- in a wide range of CRM topic areas. Don't miss these!

Oracle CRM On Demand

• 9:00 AM: Why Go With Oracle CRM On Demand -- Moscone West, Rm 2001


• 10:30 AM: Leveraging Oracle CRM On Demand Analytics - Moscone West, Rm 2001


• 12:00 PM: Oracle CRM On Demand Advanced Integration Techniques -- Moscone West, Rm 2001

Sales, Social CRM, and Order Management

• 9:00 AM: Sharing Content Through Social Networks to Boost Productivity and Effectiveness -- Moscone West Rm 2009


• 9:00 AM: Looking to the Future: Siebel Customer Order Management -- Moscone West, Rm 3002


• 10:00 AM: Siebel Sales: Strategy and Overview -- Moscone West Rm 2009


• 1:30 PM: Best Practices and Lessons Learned Implementing Siebel Sales at Oracle -- Moscone West Rm 2009

• 9:00 AM: Using Siebel CRM/Oracle Enterprise Content Management Suite to Drive Growth and Profitability -- Moscone West Rm 2010


• 10:00 AM: Cut Waste and TIme with to Market with Siebel Marketing and Oracle Content Management -- Moscone West Rm 2010

E-Billing

• 9:00 AM: E-Billing: Learn How Companies Are Driving to a More Cost-Effective Channel -- Mosctone West Rm 3016

Siebel Infrastructure and Technology

• 9:00 AM Maximizing Business Value: Deploying, Provisioning, and Managing Siebel CRM -- Moscone West Rm 3018


• 12:00 PM: Going Global with Siebel CRM -- Moscone West Rm 2009


• 3:00 PM: How to Keep Your Siebel CRM Application Users and Your Boss Happy -- Moscone West Rm 2010

Industries

• 9:00 AM: Natural Language Policy Automation: Empower Users to Manage Policy Complexity -- Westin Market St. Hotel, Metropolitan I


• 9:00 AM: Bridge Pharmaceuticals' Sales and Marketing with Siebel Personalized Content Delivery -- Westin Market St. Hotel, Metropolitan II


• l0:30 AM: On-Demand CRM for Engineering and Construction -- Westin Market St. Hotel, Metropolitan I


• 12:00 PM: Next-Generation Customer-centric Retailing with Siebel Loyalty -- Westin Market St. Hotel, Metropolitan I


• 3:00 PM: Integrate Oracle Policy Automation with Siebel Solutions in Less Than 30 Minutes -- Westin Market St. Hotel, Metropolitan I

Don't miss out on these sessions today!

10:15 AM - 11:15 AM

• Optimizing Sales with Oracle CRM On Demand: Presented by Carlson Wagonlit and Oracle. Moscone West Rm 2001

• Oracle Application Integration Architecture and CRM: Road Map and Results: Moscone West Rm 2009

11:45 AM - 12:45 PM

• PRM for Oracle CRM On Demand: Product Overview and Customer Success: Presented by NetApp and Oracle. Westin Market St. Hotel, Metropolitan I

• Mobility Solutions and Road Map for Siebel CRM and Oracle CRM On Demand: Moscone West Rm 2009

• Improving Customer Service with a Well-Executed Knowledge Management Strategy: Moscone West 3018

1:00 PM - 1:30 PM

• How to Use Oracle CRM On Demand to Unlock Hidden Value in Your Healthcare Business: 1:00 - 1:30 PM, Westin Market St. Hotel, Metropolitan I

1:45 PM - 2:15 PM

• Creating Custom Siebel Reports, Using Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher: Moscone West 2009

• Oracle CRM On Demand Mobile Sales Assistant Field Use: Moscone West 2010

5:00 PM - 6:00 PM

• Delivering Superior Customer Service with a SaaS Model: Presented by Oracle with ADP and DirecTV. 5:00 PM, Moscone West Rm 2001

• Drive Better Results with Oracle's Marketing and Lead Management Solutions: Moscone West Rm 2010

• New Commercial Models in the Pharmaceutical Industry Imply New CRM Approach: Moscone West, Rm 3014

The "clouds" continued to pour rain in San Francisco today, but that did nothing to dampen the spirit of Oracle OpenWorld. Our customers and partners continued to make their way to several sessions across Moscone Center. I was at an interesting session this morning, that was primarily customer-run. It was "Best Practices and Challenges with a Global Rollout of Siebel Sales" in Moscone West.

The customers present were Sabre Travel Networks, UPS, Agilent Technologies and CSL Behring, so 4 different customers from 4 different verticals, some had been customers for the past 7 years to one that just went live YESTERDAY. They had common suggestions for a successful implementation.
- Standardize on tools and languages across your geographies
- Keep customization to the minimum- your application the more successful it will be for you
- Increase user adoption by involving the users during the design process, that way they will be ready to embrace it when you do the actual rollout
- Find people to "help", like others who have been through the same process before, partner with the Oracle community-Oracle team as well as other customers
- Reduce the number of time spent on training, try to implement online or regional training, it is a big cost saving.

Now for Day 3 tomorrow hoping for fewer clouds...

According to Paul Greenberg from The 56 Group in the Planning for Recovery session moderated by Oracle CRM SVP, Anthony Lye... Having Customer Satisfaction as part of your company's core foundation is crap! What you should focus on is creating Customer Advocacy. There are 4 key questions you need to ask to measure Customer Advocacy.

(1) Would you (the customer) recommend this company to someone you know?
(2) Did you (the customer) recommend this company to someone you know?
(3) Did they become a customer?
(4) Are they a profitable customer?

Most companies stop after question #1.

Using on-demand software enables companies of all sizes to focus more on their core business and less on supporting applications. This model is especially compelling for CRM, a space in which research and development has led to highly social, highly collaborative applications that are easy to integrate with other business applications. To learn more about the perks of using on-demand CRM, read this interview with Anthony Lye, Oracle senior vice president of CRM, by the Oracle OpenWorld Show Daily staff.

New Functionality Delivers Expanded Collaboration and Communication Benefits for Sales Professionals
Continuing to build and expand on its industry-defining mobile CRM and Social CRM innovations, Oracle today announced the new releases of Oracle® Mobile Sales Assistant 2.0 for BlackBerry and Oracle Social CRM Applications Release 3, which introduces the new Oracle CRM Sales Campaigns On Demand and enhancements to Oracle CRM Sales Library on Demand and Oracle CRM Sales Prospector On Demand.

Hear more from a customer executive panel at OOW about ways to successfully mitigate risks in CRM implementations. Customer experiences include HP with the largest Seibel CRM implementation, Scottish Windows with millions of customers and US Foodservice using Oracle CRM On Demand.

Day #2 for sessions at Oracle OpenWorld, and there are so many sessions to choose from. Check out the Focus On Documents for a comprehensive list of Oracle CRM On Demand and Siebel CRM sessions:
- Oracle CRM On Demand
- Siebel Sales/PRM/Order Management
- Siebel Service
- Siebel Marketing
- Siebel Infrastructure and Technology
- CRM in the Communications Industry

Here are just a few to consider:

• Oracle CRM On Demand Product Strategy and Road Map: 11:30 AM - 12:30 PM. Moscone West Rm 2001

• Social CRM Applications: Strategy Overview and Road Map: 11:30 AM - 12:30 PM. Moscone West Rm 2009

• Best Practices and Challenges with a Global Rollout of Siebel Sales: Customer Panel: featuring CSL Behring, Agilent Technologies, and Sabre Travel. 11:30 AM - 12:30 PM. Moscone West Rm 2010

• Siebel Customer Relationship Management for Communications: 11:30 AM - 12:30 PM. Westin Market Street Hotel, Metropolitan I.

• Wealth Management for Banking, Insurance, Mutual Funds, and Asset Management: 1:00 PM. Westin Market Street Hotel, Metropolitan I

• Oracle CRM On Demand Best Practices: 2:30 PM. Moscone West Rm 2001

• CRM Innovations That Have Helped Customers Transform the Way They Do Business: See what Groupe Carrefour, Siemens, and Swedish Rail have done with CRM to transform their business. 2:30 PM. Moscone West 2009

• Siebel Contact Center and Siebel Service Strategy Overview and Road Map: 2:30 PM. Moscone West Rm 2010.

• Ensuring Consistent Service Delivery and Client Outcomes in Social Services: 2:30 PM. Westin Market St. Hotel, Metropolitan I.

• The Next Generation of the Siebel CRM User Interface: 4:00 PM. Moscone West, Rm 2001.

• Oracle Application Integration Architecture and CRM: Customer Panel: Featuring Pella, PTC, and RMIG. 4:00 PM. Moscone West, Rm 2009.

• Oracle CRM On Demand Life Sciences Strategy Overview and Road Map: 4:00 PM. Westin Market St. Hotel, Metropolitan II.

That was an interesting comment by Beagle Research's Denis Pombriant, who along with Paul Greenberg shared thoughts on the SFA market in a session moderated by Oracle CRM SVP, Anthony Lye.

• What state is the CRM market in? Businesses have gone from a corporate ecosystem to a customer focused eco-system, it is all about the customer and what they want, where they want it, how they want it and when the want it. CRM can make a huge difference in how companies compete in the marketplace today. We hear that SFA implementations fail more often than not but it is not the sales people nor the CRM software that goes wrong but really the leadership and how the applications are used. An interesting statistic-despite having SFA systems, 50% of companies still use spreadsheets, 61% of companies with best practices in sales mentioned that they get more value out of SFA systems than they put in and companies in which just VPs of sales were surveyed, they stated that only 13% got more value out of their SFA systems than they put in. This means that there is still a lot of scope for CRM to add value and hence tremendous opportunity ahead. We really might be on the cusp of the golden age in the CRM market with rising oil prices,economic recession, fuel prices going up, we need to continue innovating at a much higher degree than we have in the past.

• On Social CRM- Paul Greenberg defines Social CRM as the companies response to the customers response of the customers conversations. A company that has done a great job on Social CRM is Procter and Gamble- They have a social network of mothers. The only criteria is that the mothers had to have a social network of 25 mothers. Another example was Nabisco, the idea of the 100 calorie snack pack came from a a community of 300 people together.

• Cloud Computing- Paul Greenberg "I often disagree with Larry Ellison but at the end of the cloud there's a server, & it's necessary for the cloud to exist". The idea of a cloud is that you create an environment. Lots of customers don't want to move everything to the cloud quite yet because of security issues.

I had the opportunity to attend the Siebel Marketing and Loyalty roadmap session today at Oracle OpenWorld, and Melissa Boxer, vice president of product marketing for those products, outlined the four basic principles to customer centricity:
1) Understand your customers: know who they are and how their behavior is changing.What are your customers' preferences -- where and how do they buy, what do they like or don't like?
2) Reward, recognize, and differentiate: Once you have a rich repository of customer data, leverage the insight gleaned to recognize differences in customers and their behaviors and think beyond basic loyalty points. Really think about what's meaningful to your customers to deliver a personalized, differentiated experience via every channel and interaction.
3) Engage across channels with relevant interactions: Customers aren't listening to traditional marketing. They are looking for rich dialogues with you -- and you need to be able to do that through any channel.
4) Build powerful communities of loyal customers: by doing so, you will build brand affinity and value for customers.

By following through on all these, you will build not just loyal customers, but as Denis Pombriant pointed out in an earlier session, you will create a core foundation of customer advocacy which should be a mission critical strategy for any organization.

The Oracle CRM Executive Customer Panel session at Oracle OpenWorld featured success stories from around the world and across diverse industries. While the stories were unique, there was one common theme: CRM from Oracle works.

Anthony Lye, Senior Vice President, CRM at Oracle, opened the session by introducing the panel of four Oracle CRM customers.

Shauna Della, VP, Sales IT at HP, gave an overview of HP's 35,000 user Siebel 8 implementation. Siebel CRM is a single source of reality for HP since it contains every opportunity and account around the world. With Siebel, HP can monitor and measure effectiveness of the sales process, sales velocity and sales performance globally! And they have seen some impressive results including improving pipeline health by 257%, improving lead to revenue by $1 Billion (yes, that's Billion with a "B"), and reducing non-productive sales time by 9%.

Up next was Christian Venter, Head of Sales & Service, Global Solution Delivery at ANZ, the largest Australian bank in Asia and one of the top 45 banks globally. Chris described how his team deployed Siebel to over 10,000 users including 850 bank branches to better serve the bank's customers. ANZ utilizes Siebel 8's Task-based UI to create a simple, intuitive user interface based on a user's role and reduce time to originate multiple bank products by 30%. ANZ has already saved over 30,000 sales hours in its branches.

Batting third was Stephen Miller, Sales Operations Manager at Scottish Widows. Scottish Widows is part of the Lloyds Banking Group with more than 6 million life, pension and investment customers. They implemented Oracle CRM On Demand to manage relationships with over 18,500 independent financial advisers and to improve their market penetration. After a head-to-head comparison with salesforce.com, Scottish Widows deployed Oracle CRM On Demand in two months and are taking advantage of CRM On Demand's powerful analytics. In addition, their mobile sales force is more productive with Oracle Mobile Sales Assistant.

Bridget Warns, Senior Director, Customer Engagement and Integration at US Foodservice, batted clean up. Hey, it is October and I'm from Southern California, home of the Angels AND Dodgers, so I'm staying with the baseball theme! Bridget provided an overview of how US Foodservice deployed Oracle CRM On Demand to 6,125 sales users. US Foodservice is a great example of best practices for implementing CRM. They worked closely with their users, had a thorough training and phased rollout plan and received very strong executive sponsorship. As a result, US Foodservice has grown market share, even in this economy!

These customers are doing something right. Are you? Tell us how Oracle CRM is working for you.

One hot topic at OpenWorld today was about building loyalty. One common measure is the Net Promoter Score (NPS). This measures the likelihood of customers to recommend your products compared with the likelihood that they will detract. It is primarily about intent.

One lesson learned is that you can move beyond a customer promoter rating to measure customer referral value (CRV). That is based on the combination of attitude and behavior -- actual buying and recommending is good. One strategy is to focus on customers who have a good attitude but could buy and recommend more. They are natural advocates, if you will nurture their loyalty.

What's your bet -- peers or vendor marketers? According to an Edelman Trust Report from 2007, customers trust peers 75% versus vendor PR at only 20%.

One of the topics at the great, standing room-only OpenWorld CRM sessions addressed Social CRM. Since customers trust their peers the most, companies that can facilitate customer-to-customer relationships will do great. Anthony Lye added, Social CRM is more of a strategy than a mere application. The point is for sales and marketing teams to understand the customers that you want to engage. It is transformational, the next phase in CRM maturity after on demand or on premise transactional CRM. Learn more at oracle.com/socialcrm.

I'm on my iPhone right now so can't get too detailed, but Oracle's Jeff Lumsden just gave an excellent presentation on Oracle's Inner Circle Partners for Oracle CRM On Demand. He profiled 15 of these partners -- not in typical 'death by Powerpoint' fashion -- but by describing a realistic scenario that weaves in the value propositions of these companies.

If you're here at OOW, I encourage you to visit the Partner Pavillion and look for these Oracle CRM On Demand partners -- go to Booth 421 at Moscone South. If you're not, then you can go to crmondemand.oracle.com and click on the 'Partners' tab to learn more.

Hi folks,

Oracle OpenWorld 2009 is now here! We will be using this blog and Twitter to talk about what's happening at Oracle OpenWorld 2009 through the next 4 days and beyond. For those of you on Twitter and those who will be tweeting during the conference, we have set up a Twitter Hash Tag to keep you updated on the latest from Oracle OpenWorld 2009. Our hashtag is #OOWOCRM

This is the way I do my searches,
Go to the Twitter Search page, then enter the tag in the search field and voila you should see a list of Oracle CRM tweets. You do not have to be a Twitter user to follow the updates.

We really encourage you to join the conversation as well...those of you who are tweeting during the conference should defintely use this hashtag in your messages to connect with others who are looking to keep up with what is happening...

Our Twitter handle is Twitter.com/OracleCRM. Follow us!

If you are at Oracle OpenWorld this week, and are looking to talk directly with an Oracle CRM product manager, here is your chance to reach the right one.

The "Meet the Experts" program has been designed for customers to directly meet product managers and other folks in development. It is at the Applications Lounge which is located at Moscone West, Lobby Level 2. The lounge is open Monday-Thursday 9 am-5 pm, the "Meet the Experts" hours are
- Monday - 9:00am-5:00pm
- Tuesday - 9:00am-5:00pm
- Wednesday - 9:00am-2:00pm
Check here for more details on "Meet the Experts" and the Applications Lounge and for the schedule click here Don't miss this great opportunity!

It is always good to get news on how our software is being used, in various industries and across the globe. Word comes from Oracle customer Samsung that they have developed a mobile CRM service which is based on our Oracle products, including our mobile offerings. Read here for more details on this announcement. For more on Oracle CRM click here.

That's right...me! In just a little more than a week, I'll be giving a presentation. At OpenWorld! Man, somebody must not have been paying attention.

In all seriousness, at 9 a.m. Pacific time on Thursday, October 15th, I'll be discussing why organizations of all types and sizes should "go with" Oracle CRM On Demand. I'm not going to get long-winded here (you can look at the abstract here). But we'll be featuring Oracle CRM On Demand customer Kevin Raybon, General Manager of Sales Operations at NEC Unified Solutions; and Adam May, a Director in Oracle's CRM product development organization.

Will Steven Tyler be sitting in the front row? I don't think so, which leaves plenty of room for you. So in the words of Johnny Olson, "Come on down!"

Don't miss the great CRM application and industry demos at OpenWorld. You'll see what's new and how it can help your organization. Industry highlights include:

Siebel Communications
This demo features the major evolution of Oracle's Siebel Customer Relationship Management for the communications industry, with next-generation e-commerce, e-billing self-service, loyalty management, and advanced bulk orders functionality. The solutions increase customer loyalty and profitability, capitalize growth opportunity, and reduce operational costs.
Industries Demo Area, Moscone South, S-086

Higher Education Solutions
Learn how you can better manage student relationships, meet reporting requirements, deliver learning, and drive value from your applications investment. Hear about new features and functionality released in Oracle's campus solutions. See how you can improve data management for more insight and better decision-making.
Industries Demo Area, Moscone South, S-080

Insurance CRM and Claims
Learn about Oracle's insurance claims solution, which provides rules-based, end-to-end claims processing that improves quality and efficiency of claims handling, reduces costs, and improves visibility into the claims organization. This demo also covers Siebel Insurance, which offers robust CRM functionality from sales to customer service, allowing insurers to improve distribution management.
Industries Demo Area, Moscone South, S-084

CRM for Life Sciences
Oracle's CRM solutions for life sciences deliver innovative capabilities to help companies adapt to changing customer needs and new economic and regulatory environments. Learn about the new features geared toward life sciences in Oracle CRM On Demand, a new mobile sales application for the pharmaceutical industry, and new sample compliance and business intelligence capabilities.
Industries Demo Area, Moscone South, S-083

Manufacturing Campaign-to-Cash
As competition and market pressures change and increase, high technology and auto companies are continually evolving their go-to-market strategies. The ability to flexibly adapt, as well as proactively prepare your organization to respond to change, is an essential component to Oracle's solution. Learn how Oracle's campaign-to-cash applications help drive profitability and efficiencies throughout your sales processes. Industries Demo Area, Moscone South, S-077

Public Sector Case Management and Policy Automation
Learn about Oracle's case management and policy automation solutions.
Industries Demo Area, Moscone South, S-087

Oracle Solutions for Utilities
Learn how utilities benefit from Oracle Self-Service E-Billing and Siebel Energy, and learn how they integrate with back-office applications. Oracle Self-Service E-Billing provides a superior customer self-service solution that strengthens customer relationships and reduces operating costs. Siebel Energy enables retail and other utilities to manage customer interaction processes, ensuring critical operations and marketplace success.
Palace Hotel, HPU-004

Registered attendees can pre-enroll for these sessions. Haven't registered? There is still time!

We are now less than a week away from Oracle OpenWorld 2009, and the excitement is building up. For Application Integration Architecture, here are some key sessions:

S311991 Oracle Application Integration Architecture and CRM: Road Map and Results
Presenter: Christine Viera, Oracle
Oracle Application Integration Architecture is designed to help organizations maximize the value of CRM with other enterprise application investments by sharing vital customer and product information through prebuilt process integration packs. This session covers Oracle's CRM product strategy in this area, current integration solutions, and the road map for future process integration packs. Learn how these prebuilt integrations are enabling customers to accelerate deployment and gain measurable business results.
Wednesday, 10/14/2009 10:15 am - 11:15 am, Moscone West Rm 2010

S311995 Oracle Application Integration Architecture and CRM: Customer Panel
Presenters: Rick Hassman, Pella Corporation; Michael Lillie, PTC; Christine Viera, Oracle; Marcel van Leeuwen, RMIG
You want to drive greater productivity and business efficiency by integrating your existing applications, but integrations can be costly, resource-intensive, and difficult to maintain. Prebuilt integrations built on the Oracle Application Integration Architecture framework address these issues. Come to this session to learn how customers like you are benefiting from prebuilt integrations of Oracle's Siebel Customer Relationship Management and Oracle CRM On Demand with other Oracle applications to reduce time to deployment, lower costs, gain greater business and customer insight, and increase sales productivity and effectiveness.
Tuesday, 10/13/2009 4:00 pm-5:00 pm, Moscone West Rm 2009

S311178 Smart Strategies: Prepare For Tomorrow Leverage What You Have Today
Presenters: Jose Lazares, Oracle; Adrian Dilworth, Vodafone Qatar; V.K. Rajaram, Intuit

This session covers smart strategies for leveraging your enterprise applications to create better, more powerful connections between lines of business, letting you share vital customer/product information. It provides an overview of Oracle's strategy and road map for three key areas: Oracle Application Integration Architecture, master data management, and Oracle User Productivity Kit/Oracle Tutor. Each helps IT strategists maximize the value achieved from their Oracle investments, providing a rapid approach to integration, planning, and training across Oracle and legacy applications. Learn how these solutions are helping customers accelerate deployment, transition to Oracle Fusion Applications, and create greater value for the business.
Monday, 10/12/2009, 16:00 - 17:00, Moscone West Rm 3010/3012

S311198 Extraordinary Results, Rapid ROI with End-to-End Business Process Integrations
Presenters: Jeff Hand, Zebra; Nanda Kalathil, Oracle; Sankaran Srinivasen, Zebra Technologies

This session focuses on an Oracle Application Integration Architecture success story. Robust growth may be great for the bottom line, but it can wreak havoc on a unified IT infrastructure. For Zebra Technologies, each of the company's 10 acquisitions brought with it another set of enterprise applications, until the company was finally faced with 140 disparate applications that needed to be consolidated into a single global system. Find out how Zebra leveraged Oracle Application Integration Architecture to take a phased approach to integrating existing assets with new Oracle applications and modernize the application portfolio while realizing a 60 percent cost savings. Need we say more?
Monday, 10/13/2009, 11:30 - 12:30, Moscone West L3 Rm 3008

S311199 The Dell Way: Enabling Application Interoperability Globally with Distributed SOA
Presenters: Ravi Sankaran, Oracle; Chary Tamirisa, Dell; Dwij Trivedi, DELL

This session focuses on an Oracle Application Integration Architecture success story. Leveraging Oracle Application Integration Architecture Foundation Pack and Oracle Fusion Middleware, Oracle customer Dell Inc. has been able to develop a consistent tested methodology and world-class distributed SOA platform. Designed to promote rapid deployment, reusability, and configurability of business processes, Oracle Application Integration Architecture saves companies significant time, effort, and cost compared to building integrations from the ground up and helps you realize the value of a service-oriented architecture (SOA) at an accelerated pace.
Wednesday, 10/14/2009, 10:15 - 11:15, Moscone West L3 Rm 3008

S311201 Customer Success Panel: Gain a Competitive Edge and Increase Business Efficiencies
Presenters: Angie Wong, Oracle; Paul Delvecchio, Fidelity; Cliff Musante, Intuit; Mark Temple, Ciena

This session features a panel of Oracle Application Integration Architecture customers--Fidelity, Ciena, Tikona, and Intuit--as they discuss their successes. Leveraging Oracle Application Integration Architecture, specifically the process integration packs, these customers have been able to increase their competitive edge while increasing business and IT efficiencies. You will hear from each customer, get a chance to ask your questions, and learn about how they are maximizing their existing Oracle investments with a quick approach to integrating and orchestrating processes across Oracle and legacy applications.
Wednesday, 10/14/2009, 11:45 - 12:45, Moscone West L3 Rm 3002/3004

To get more details on other Application Integration Architecture sessions, demos and parties go to the Focus On guide.
See you at Oracle OpenWorld 2009!

S310831 Siebel Retail Overview: Loyalty, Multichannel, Service, and Case Management
Presenters: Mike Dominy, Oracle
This session provides an overview of the overall retail strategy for Oracle's Siebel product line and outlines how the Siebel applications are being applied to several key retail challenges, including cross-channel customer loyalty, multichannel order management, and cross-channel customer service and support.
Monday, 10/12/2009, 16:00 - 17:00, Westin Market Street Hotel Metropolitan I **

S310788 Siebel Customer Relationship Management for Communications
Presenters: David Fan, Oracle
Aiming to improve profitability by streamlining operational efficiency and reducing time to market in the world of convergence, Siebel CRM leverages the breadth of Oracle technical and application solutions to deliver the most-complete industry business processes.
Tuesday , 10/13/2009, 11:30 - 12:30, Westin Market Street Hotel Metropolitan I **

S310805 Wealth Management for Banking, Insurance, Mutual Funds, and Asset Management
Presenters: Aubrey Hawes, Oracle
Come to this session to learn about new wealth management capabilities in Oracle's software-as-a-service/CRM offering Oracle CRM On Demand, new out-of-the-box Oracle Application Integration Architecture integrations for financial services, and complementary functionality provided by Oracle FLEXCUBE Private Banking.
Tuesday, 10/13/2009, 13:00 - 14:00, Westin Market Street Hotel Metropolitan I **

S311984 Ensuring Consistent Service Delivery and Client Outcomes in Social Services
Speakers: Steven Krogen, IRS; Nico Padovan, DIAC; Calvin Tu, Oracle
Hear firsthand from leading government agencies how Oracle solutions are helping them achieve consistent service delivery and better outcomes with lower overall cost of ownership.
Tuesday, 10/13/2009, 14:30 - 15:30, Westin Market Street Hotel, Metropolitan I

S310849 Empower Hospitality and Retail Loyalty Programs with Siebel Loyalty Management Solutions
Presenters: Prabir Sengupta, ITC; Sundar Swaminathan, Oracle; Alok Verma, ITC InfoTech
This session provides an overview of Oracle's Siebel loyalty management platform and shows how a major hospitality and retail enterprise drives customer loyalty to its hospitality and retail offerings through Siebel loyalty management solutions and Oracle Business Intelligence Suite, Enterprise Edition.
Tuesday, 10/13/2009, 14:30 - 15:30,Westin Market Street Hotel Metropolitan II **

S310794 Leveraging Siebel CRM to Thrive in the Professional Services Industry
Presenters: Marilu Davis, Hewlett-Packard; Marshall Powell, Oracle
Hear Oracle and HP Application Services discuss how HP and other large companies stay ahead of their competitors in the services industry through innovative customer acquisition, retention, and service execution strategies.
Tuesday, 10/13/2009, 16:00 - 17:00,Westin Market Street Hotel Metropolitan I **

S310810 Oracle CRM On Demand Life Sciences Strategy Overview and Road Map
Presenters: Piers Evans, Oracle
Attend this session to understand how Oracle CRM On Demand enables life sciences sales and marketing processes today and will continue to do so in the future.
Tuesday, 10/13/2009, 16:00 - 17:00, Westin Market Street Hotel Metropolitan II **

S307994: Ignite Your Distribution Management Strategy
Presenters: Tom King and Antonius Wiryawan, Oracle; Scott Mampre, Capgemini
This session explains how Oracle Insurance products are breaking distribution barriers with integrated data capture/new business, CRM, rating, and document management systems to enable straight-through processing and improve channel relationships and current distribution channels.
Wednesday 10/14/2009 10:15 - 11:15 Westin Market Street Hotel, Franciscan I

S310790 Enterprise Case Management in a Program-centric World
Speakers: Surend Dayal and Amy Santenello, Oracle
This session discusses strategies for successful policy modeling and automation as part of an enterprise case management solution and provides an update on future enhancements to Oracle's Siebel Public Sector case management solution.
Wednesday, 10/14/2009, 10:15 - 11:15, Westin Market Street Hotel, Metropolitan I

S310826 Bridge Pharmaceuticals' Sales and Marketing with Siebel Personalized Content Delivery
Presenters: Chad Kirchner, Oracle
Attend this session to understand how Siebel Personalized Content Delivery can help bridge the sales and marketing gap to enable true closed loop marketing in your organization.
Thursday, 10/15/2009, 09:00 - 10:00, Westin Market Street Hotel Metropolitan II **

S311983 Natural Language Policy Automation: Empower Users to Manage Policy Complexity
Speaker: Davin Fifield, Oracle
Empower business users to develop and manage rules directly from legislative and policy documents. Come to this session to see how legislation and policy documents are rapidly transformed into unambiguous natural language business rules.
Thursday, 10/15/2009, 09:00 - 10:00, Westin Market Street Hotel, Metropolitan I

S311871 On-Demand CRM for Engineering and Construction
Presenters: Craig Larson, Oracle
Learn how Oracle CRM On Demand's engineering and construction solution provides a single and actionable 360-degree view of your customer; full CRM lifecycle management and integration with ERP solutions such as Oracle Projects and with Oracle's Primavera solutions; advanced analytics; and much more.
Thursday, 10/15/2009, 10:30 - 11:30, Westin Market Street Hotel Metropolitan I **

S310837 Next-Generation Customer-centric Retailing with Siebel Loyalty
Presenters: Don Rome, Oracle; Shyam Shah, Oracle
This session provides an overview of how Oracle's Siebel Loyalty can help retailers enhance their customer-centric loyalty initiatives while ensuring a more consistent cross-channel experience for improved profitability.
Thursday, 10/15/200,12:00 - 13:00, Westin Market Street Hotel Metropolitan I **

S310573 Integrate Oracle Policy Automation with Siebel Solutions in Less Than 30 Minutes
Speakers: Heike Lorenz and Philip Whitwell, Oracle
In this technical session, see Oracle Policy Automation and Oracle's Siebel Customer Relationship Management in action and learn about best practices for configuration.
Thursday, 10/15/2009, 15:00 - 16:00, Westin Market Street Hotel, Metropolitan I

"Through 2010, 70 percent of Fortune 1000 organizations will apply MDM programs to ensure the accuracy and integrity of commonly shared business information for compliance, operational efficiency and competitive differentiation purposes (0.7 probability)." Gartner

Join us for these four sessions at Oracle OpenWorld that are Master Data Management (MDM)-CRM specific

S308324 MDM ROI Model: Justify and Measure Your Implementation Payback
Speakers: Franco Amalfi, Oracle Canada ULC; Dhiman Bhattacharjee, Oracle; Eva Larson, Zebra Technologies Corporation
Justifying an MDM investment is one of the most difficult challenges customers face in their journey to a single, clean view of master entities shared across the enterprise. Moreover, measuring the payback effect of a completed implementation has been similarly difficult. This presentation covers the new Oracle MDM ROI tool and how key customers have used it to build a solid and appealing business case for management and have used it to validate after the go-live that MDM is actually delivering on its promises.
Wednesday, 10/14/2009 10:15 - 11:15, Moscone West L3, Room 3001

S308301 Understand Oracle MDM Strategy and How Cisco Turned Data into a Corporate Asset
Speakers: Pascal Laik, Oracle; Kin-Ching Wu, Cisco Systems
Get an overview of Oracle's master data management footprint and vision. Learn how some of the world's leading organizations are creating a clean source of master data for their enterprise spanning multiple domains by using Oracle's MDM solutions. Discover why more than 800 customers have selected Oracle MDM solutions to help generate tangible benefits such as delivering smarter, fact-based decision-making; increasing customer satisfaction levels; and achieving faster new product introductions while reducing data management costs and meeting increasingly stringent privacy and regulatory requirements. Join Oracle and Cisco Systems for this illuminating MDM session.
Monday, 10/12/2009 13:00 - 14:00, Moscone West L3, Room 3001

S308302 Customer Information as an Enterprise Asset with New Oracle Customer Hub 8.2 Release
Speakers: Mel Badgett, Aragon Consulting Group, Inc.; Bill Miller, Oracle; Manoj Tahiliani, Oracle
Managing customer information as an enterprise asset is a basic part of creating a customer-centric enterprise. This session covers customer MDM, from justifying it as a strategy for operational excellence to managing customer data, governance, compliance, analytics, and identity management and leveraging new Oracle Data Quality applications, Oracle Application Integration Architecture, and implementation best practices. The session shows how best-in-class hierarchy management is enhanced with Oracle Universal Content Management and Oracle database resource manager (DRM) integration; it includes a demo presented with Aragon Consulting deep-dives into the new features in Oracle Customer Hub (formerly Siebel Universal Customer Master 8.2).
Monday, 10/12/2009 14:30 - 15:30, Moscone West L3, Room 3001

S308319 Master Data Management Customer Panel: Implementation Challenges and Best Practices
Speakers: Rohit Tandon, Oracle; Bill Miller, Oracle; Mangus Von Krogh, Posten Norge; Alex Dye, Master Lock; John-Paul Hurtado, Royal Caribbean
In this session, a panel of customers using Oracle master data management (MDM) solutions will respond to questions from the audience along the themes of key implementation challenges and lessons learned from real-life customer, product, financials, and other mastering implementations. Please join customers Posten Norge, Master Lock, and Oracle at Oracle for this highly informative MDM discussion.
Thursday, 10/15/2009 13:30 - 14:30, Moscone West L3, Room 3001

Registered attendees can pre-enroll for these sessions. Join us, there is still time!

Sure, this could be my last post as an Oracle employee, given that we sell CRM software But I don't think so. Here's why.

While I can't get much more specific here, a few months ago, a particular video about how a particular transportation company breaks particular musical instruments was all the rage on the most popular online viral video sites. Now, given that this particular transportation company is an Oracle Corporation customer, I won't provide any names here. Besides, I've been a highly faithful customer of this particular transportation company for decades and will continue to have an allegiance with them for many more decades.

But here is the point, and I'm pretty sure you already know this, although it always bears repeating. CRM is about so much more than software. It's about the people and processes that drive your business. It's about the 'how' as well as the 'what.' It's about how you treat and respond to that customer after you break her or his musical instrument. It's about whether you have the insight to respond to them appropriately. And it's about the knowledge of -- when things are going well -- how to serve their needs by offering them something else they may benefit from.

And if the people who drive your sales and customer service processes are not aligned, if your culture is not built around serving the needs and aspirations of your customers, then no technology will bridge that gap.

I'd also submit that the 'people equation' has a lot to do with the domain expertise and experience of your CRM provider. It goes well beyond the applications they offer. And nobody has more domain expertise than Oracle in CRM. I know that sounds brash and aggressive. But it's a fact.

Now, all of this said, if your technology doesn't provide your customer-facing employees with the vital and actionable insights they need to serve "the needs and aspirations of your customers," then they likely won't be able to bridge that gap.

So...if you're interested in learning how to drive sales, marketing and service effectiveness with a company that has helped more organizations like yours than anyone else on the planet to do just that, then come on out to San Francisco and join us at Oracle OpenWorld. We have a lot of 'people' who would love to meet and speak with you.

To find out more about specific sessions, demos, and networking opportunities, take a look at the Focus On guides for Oracle CRM On Demand, Siebel Sales/PRM/Order Management, Siebel Service, Siebel Marketing and Loyalty, and Siebel CRM Infrastructure and Technology.

And please visit the Oracle OpenWorld page to plan, register, and enroll in sessions and activities. OK, I'm out of breath.

Don't miss the great industry CRM sessions and exhibits at OpenWorld. Highlights include:

S311663 Customer Relationship Management for Higher Education: Road Map to the Right Solution
Speakers: Gary Allen and Sandra Sanvido, Oracle
Discover how customer relationship management can help you streamline processes and improve relationships across the entire constituent lifecycle in the areas of recruiting, retention, and student services. This session covers the Oracle product road map for higher education and highlights Oracle's upcoming PeopleSoft Enterprise release and CRM on-demand solutions.
Thursday, 10/15/2009 10:30 - 11:30, Moscone West L3, Room 3011

Demo: Solutions for Higher Education
Learn how you can better manage student relationships, meet reporting requirements, deliver learning, and drive value from your applications investment. Hear about new features and functionality released in Oracle's campus solutions. See how you can improve data management for more insight and better decision-making.
Industries Demo Area, Moscone South, S-086

Registered attendees can pre-enroll for these sessions. Haven't registered? There is still time!

Don't miss the great industry CRM sessions and exhibits at OpenWorld. Highlights include:

S311696 General Session: Public Sector
Speakers: Mark Johnson, Oracle; David Wilson, Accenture
Learn how Oracle can help you achieve organizational goals through its recent acquisitions and integration strategies.
Monday, 10/12/2009, 13:00 - 14:15, Moscone West L3, Room 3003

S310790 Enterprise Case Management in a Program-centric World
Speakers: Surend Dayal and Amy Santenello, Oracle
This session discusses strategies for successful policy modeling and automation as part of an enterprise case management solution and provides an update on future enhancements to Oracle's Siebel Public Sector case management solution.
Wednesday, 10/14/2009, 10:15 - 11:15, Westin Market Street Hotel, Metropolitan I

S311984 Ensuring Consistent Service Delivery and Client Outcomes in Social Services
Speakers: Steven Krogen, IRS; Nico Padovan, DIAC; Calvin Tu, Oracle
Hear firsthand from leading government agencies how Oracle solutions are helping them achieve consistent service delivery and better outcomes with lower overall cost of ownership.
Tuesday, 10/13/2009, 14:30 - 15:30, Westin Market Street Hotel, Metropolitan I

S310573 Integrate Oracle Policy Automation with Siebel Solutions in Less Than 30 Minutes
Speakers: Heike Lorenz and Philip Whitwell, Oracle
In this technical session, see Oracle Policy Automation and Oracle's Siebel Customer Relationship Management in action and learn about best practices for configuration.
Thursday, 10/15/2009, 15:00 - 16:00, Westin Market Street Hotel, Metropolitan I

S311983 Natural Language Policy Automation: Empower Users to Manage Policy Complexity
Speaker: Davin Fifield, Oracle
Empower business users to develop and manage rules directly from legislative and policy documents. Come to this session to see how legislation and policy documents are rapidly transformed into unambiguous natural language business rules.
Thursday, 10/15/2009, 09:00 - 10:00, Westin Market Street Hotel, Metropolitan I

S311697 Smart Cities: Building Integrated Digital Citizen Services in the 21st Century
Panel: Lewis Carr, Oracle; Gina Knepp, City of Sacramento; Saul Melara, City of Riverside; Jay Primus, SFMTA; Gerard Stam, Public Works Rotterdam
Case study panel focused on government transformation through integrated SNEN (Single Non-Emergency Number systems, such as 311) integrated with federated single-government portals and other citizen-centric services.
Tuesday, 10/13/2009, 13:00 - 14:00, Moscone West L3, Room 3003

Demo: Case Management and Policy Automation
Learn about Oracle's case management and policy automation solutions.
Industries Demo Area, Moscone South, S-087

Registered attendees can pre-enroll for these sessions. Haven't registered? There is still time!

Sales executives face the challenge of driving growth in a challenging economy. In addition to the key executive CRM sessions, here are just a few sessions that may be of particular interest:

S311891: CRM Innovations for Sales Productivity
Presenters: Mandeep Bhullar, Brian Kelly, Tarak Patel, Oracle
Learn more about how Oracle Sales Prospector mines your past sales data and intelligently identifies quality leads, enabling Sales to sell more effectively and efficiently; Oracle Gadget Wizard for Google Apps enables you to build CRM gadgets without any programming knowledge; and the new integration with IBM Lotus Notes and Microsoft Outlook enable you to manage your CRM data in the desktop applications your users already use.
Monday 10/12/2009 16:00 - 17:00 Moscone West Room 2010

S310763: Social CRM Applications: Strategy Overview and Road Map
Presenter: Mark Woollen, Oracle
Learn how organizations can use Oracle's social CRM applications to improve business results and build engaging customer relationships.
Tuesday 10/13/2009 11:30 - 12:30 Moscone West Room 2009

S310771: Harness the Intelligence in Your Social Networks with Social Applications
Presenter: Tara Roberts, Oracle
Oracle's social CRM applications are the tools sales professionals need in order to boost their productivity and results through the productivity social networks of their peers.
Tuesday 10/13/2009 13:00 - 14:00 Moscone West Room 2009

S310746: Optimizing Sales with Oracle CRM On Demand
Presenters: Chris Haven, Oracle; Matthieu Jusserand, Carlson Wagonlit Travel
Come to this session to learn how customers are using new capabilities in Oracle CRM On Demand to increase revenue, reduce costs, and make more members of the sales team peak performers.
Wednesday 10/14/2009 10:15 - 11:15 Moscone West Room 2001

S311006: Improve Margins with Oracle CRM On Demand or Siebel Deal
Speakers: Tarak Patel,Billy Turchin, Oracle
In this session, learn how to strategically manage price to increase margins throughout the deal lifecycle with Oracle CRM On Demand Deal Management and Siebel Deal Management.
Wednesday 10/14/2009 10:15 - 11:15 Moscone West Room 3016

S310782: Mobility Solutions and Road Map for Siebel CRM and Oracle CRM On Demand
Presenters: Raj Aggarwal, Hody Crouch, Oracle
See how Siebel Mobile solutions, Siebel Handheld, Siebel Wireless, and Oracle Mobile Sales Assistant can be used to improve efficiency and effectiveness within your organization.
Wednesday 10/14/2009 11:45 - 12:45 Moscone West Room 2009

S310773: Sharing Content through Social Networks to Boost Productivity
Presenters: Eric Ho, Alicia Wu, Oracle
This session highlights key capabilities of Oracle Sales Library and Oracle Sales Campaigns to empower your sales and marketing professionals with the collective knowledge of their social networks.
Thursday 10/15/2009 09:00 - 10:00 Moscone West Room 2009

S311019: Siebel Sales: Strategy and Overview
Presenter: Rajit Joseph, Oracle
The presentation focuses on Siebel Sales and provides information on the latest product releases, updated road maps, and customer successes across industries.
Thursday 10/15/2009 10:30 - 11:30 Moscone West Room 2009

Registered attendees can pre-enroll in these sessions. If you haven't registered yet, it's not too late!

Yes we were at the Gartner CRM Summit 2009 last week in the Scottsdale, Arizona heat while it was pouring here in the Bay area.

We had the opportunity to meet with our customers, partners and of course several of the 22 key CRM analysts that were present there from the Gartner group.

There was a lot of buzz around Social media and the importance of it being a part of your CRM strategy. This was good news for us in CRM product marketing; since we are already investing in social media and have an active Twitter and Facebook presence (do follow us-OracleCRM).
Some interesting thoughts from at the conference:

• Networks will matter more to success than any other initiatives
• If you don't engage your customers in innovation. Someone else will
• Customer service is THE most important function in a business
• Salespeople don't like tech so build what's in it for me?
• Now is a good time for Marketing Resource Management investments
• Studies have shown that 72% of companies didn't know about product problem until customers told them

With this event behind us, all efforts are now focused on Oracle OpenWorld 2009...join us!!

Don't miss the great industry CRM sessions and exhibits at OpenWorld. Highlights include:

S311913 Improving Customer Interactions and Cross-Sell with Branch Sales and Service
Speakers: Daniel Bognar, Oracle; Christian Venter, ANZ Bank
ANZ Bank outlines how it implemented Siebel 8.0 solutions for more than 9,000 users and integrated with 15 legacy systems within 12 months.
Monday, 10/12/2009, 17:30 - 18:30, Westin Market Street Hotel, Olympic

S310805: Wealth Management for Banking, Insurance, Mutual Funds and Asset Management
Speaker: Aubrey Hawes, Oracle
Learn about new capabilities in Oracle CRM On Demand, new out-of-the-box integrations for financial services, and complementary functionality provided by Oracle FLEXCUBE Private Banking.
Tuesday, 10/13/2009, 13:00 - 14:00, Westin Market Street Hotel, Metropolitan I

S310243 First Niagara Implements CRM for the Retail Bank in 12 Weeks with Oracle CRM On Demand
Speakers: Eric Dickmann, Oracle; Jason Hillner, eVerge Group
First Niagara Bank selected Oracle CRM On Demand to enable a strategic sales transformation for its retail banking network. Learn about business value gained, what made the project successful, and lessons learned.
Tuesday, 10/13/2009, 13:00 - 14:00, Westin Market Street Hotel, Concordia

S311575 Application Integration and Sustainability in Financial Services
Speakers: Anita Brady, Ashwin Goyal, Aubrey Hawes, Oracle
See how Oracle offers banks a flexible foundation to achieve new levels of differentiation and customer satisfaction with an integrated solution at a reduced "total cost of transformation."
Tuesday, 10/13/2009, 14:30 - 15:30, Westin Market Street Hotel, Olympic

S309213 MDM for Financial Services: Compliance to Competitiveness--A Customer Case Study
Speakers: Tomasz Konstantynowicz, Michal Kotnowski, TENETO Consulting sp. z o.o.; Rohit Tandon, Oracle
Discusses the business case, solution architecture, organizational considerations, and tangible business benefits achieved by implementing Oracle MDM solutions.
Tuesday, 10/13/2009, 16:00 - 17:00, Westin Market Street Hotel, Olympic

S311911 Achieving ROI Goals with Siebel Customer Relationship Management at Poalim Bank
Speakers: Eran Feit, Orit Feldman - Hazan, Poalim Bank; Nazif Mohammed, Oracle
Learn more about how Poalim Bank has leveraged its investment in Siebel CRM to improve customer service and increase sales.
Thursday, 10/15/2009, 13:30 - 14:30, Westin Market Street Hotel, Olympic

See also the CRM for Insurance sessions. Registered attendees can pre-enroll for these sessions. Haven't registered? There is still time!

Short on time? Download this short 9 minute podcast and catch up on what's happening with CRM at Oracle OpenWorld during your commute home as Cliff Godwin, Sr. Vice President Application Development, and Kirk Mosher, Vice President of CRM Product Marketing, chat about key sessions and activities.

Don't miss the great Insurance industry CRM sessions and exhibits at OpenWorld. Highlights include:

S308021: General Session: Chaos to Opportunity--A Year in Review and a Look Ahead
Presenters: Rick Connors, Chuck Johnston, and Srini Venkatasanthanam, Oracle; Jack Dugan, Capgemini
In this session, Oracle Insurance executives and Oracle partner Capgemini tell how global insurers are finding ways to succeed and prepare for a future where often opposing needs, market ambiguity, and competitive pressure can attract the most compelling results.
Monday 10/12/2009 13:00 - 14:15, Westin Market Street Hotel, Metropolitan III

S307994: Ignite Your Distribution Management Strategy
Presenters: Tom King and Antonius Wiryawan, Oracle; Scott Mampre, Capgemini
This session explains how Oracle Insurance products are breaking distribution barriers with integrated data capture/new business, CRM, rating, and document management systems to enable straight-through processing and improve channel relationships and current distribution channels.
Wednesday 10/14/2009 10:15 - 11:15 Westin Market Street Hotel, Franciscan I

Demo: Oracle's CRM and Insurance Claims Solutions
Learn about Siebel Insurance, which offers robust CRM functionality from sales to customer service. This demo also covers Oracle's rules-based, end-to-end claims processing.
Industries Demo Area, Moscone South, S-084

Registered attendees can pre-enroll for these sessions. If you have not yet registered, it's not too late!

Analytics is a core component of a successful CRM strategy. Learn more at Oracle OpenWorld from customers, Oracle product experts, and Oracle's own Applications IT group on best practices.

Don't miss these sessions!

S311895: Oracle Real-Time Decisions and Siebel CRM: Product Overview and Customer Success. Learn how to leverage Oracle Real-Time Decisions across sales, e-commerce, marketing, and service interaction channels to reveal insights and improve each customer interaction. In addition, learn how customer service organizations can effectively apply self-learning predictie analytics during service interactions to maximize revenue, improve customer satisfaction, and increase customer retention.
2:30 pm on Monday, Oct 12th in Moscone West Rm. 2010

S310313: Enabling Sales Visibility and Insight with Oracle BI for Siebel CRM at Wind River. Learn how Wind River was able to obtain a single, consolidated view of sales across siloed sales channels, sales stages, and product and busines model mixes.
2:30 pm, Monday, Oct 12th in Moscone West Rm. 3014

S310311: Drive Accountability and Performance into Marketing with Analytics for Siebel CRM. Learn how Agilent utilizes Oracle Marketing Analytics to provide complete visiblity across the lead-to-retain process.
4:00 pm, Monday, Oct 12th in Moscone West Rm. 3016

S310289: Equifax Increases Customer Insight with Oracle BI for Siebel CRM Applications. Find out how Equifax uses Oracle BI applications to increase visiblity and improve decision-making in sales, marketing, service, partner programs, and contact centers.
1:00 pm, Tuesday, Oct. 13th in Moscone West Rm. 3018

S312010: Oracle's Siebel Customer Relationship Management Analytics Strategy Overview and Road Map. Learn how CRM analytics is changing the game by breaking down traditional application barriers for front-line users and how Oracle itself is gaining insight from its own analytics solution.
11:45 am, Wednesday, Oct. 14th in Moscone West 2010.

S310889: Creating Custom Siebel Reports, Using Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher. Learn how to use Oracle BI Publisher to create custom reports in Siebel CRM and convert custom Actuate reports.
1:45 pm - 2:15 pm, Wednesday, Oct. 14th in Moscone West Rm. 2009

S310696: Leveraging Oracle CRM On Demand Analytics. See how you can leverage Oracle CRM On Demand and its extensive analytics capabilities to drive real-time and historical visibility into customer interactions across the enterprise.
10:30 am, Thursday, Oct. 15th in Moscone West Rm. 2001

S311851: Converting Your Siebel Report Solution from Actuate to Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher. Examine Oracle Advanced Customer Services' best practices for preparing your business to update your reports, your reporting strategy, and the technical challenges to be aware of as you plan and execute your migration.
1:30 pm, Thursday, Oct. 15th in Westin, Metropolitan I.

S311011: Upgrade Considerations for Oracle Business Intelligence. Discover in this session when and if you should upgrade Oracle BI apps or the BI technology stack, and hear about the dependencies and new capabilities Oracle has delivered to increase the embedded integration between Siebel CRM and Oracle BI solutions.
3:00 pm, Thursday, Oct. 15th inMoscone West Rm. 3000

And don't forget to Meet the Experts in the Applications Lounge on the 2nd floor of Moscone West.
- BI Publisher from 1:00 pm to 2:00 pm on Tuesday, October 13th
- Oracle BI Applications for CRM from 2:00 pm - 3:00 pm on Tuesday, October 13th

Registered attendees can pre-enroll in these sessions. If you haven't registered yet, it's not too late!

Don't miss the great Communications industry CRM sessions and exhibits at OpenWorld. Highlights include:

Registered attendees can pre-enroll for these sessions now using Schedule Builder. If you have not yet registered, it's not too late!

No vendor goes it alone. I've written before about how critical it is to have the right partner ecoystem that is well thought out to deliver the personalized set of solutions to meet your organization's needs.

Now is your chance to see this in action. Be sure to visit our partners at the new CRM On Demand Inner Circle Pavilion, located in Moscone South, Booth 421. The Pavilion will showcase real-time integrations with Oracle CRM On Demand that open up a world of possiblities for your organization.

See how the Inner Circle is delivering success with leading edge integrations in:
- Data Quality
- Closed Loop Marketing
- Lead Generation
- Lead Conversion
- Sales Forecasting
- Voice-to-Text
- Survey Tools
- Self Service Support
- Social Collaboration
- Quote Configuration
- Proposal and Contract Generation
- Sales Performance Management
- Sales Methodologies
- Campagn Management
- Mobile Availability
- Document Management
- Communications and Contact Compliance

Attendees will also get a sneak peek at Oracle CRM On Demand Release 17 and the complementary integrations that are being developed by the Inner Circle.

We look forward to seeing you there!

Agencourt Bioscience, a leading biotech research services and products firm, has increased sales staff productivity and visibility. Oracle CRM On Demand is the key, empowering both their geographically-diverse services and products business operations with a unified yet flexible customer management application.

In this video, Rosa Cintron discusses how Agencourt benefitted from a 'plug and run' CRM on demand deployment, available with Oracle's ERP and collaboration suites. She also mentions the relationship and pricing advantages of dealing with one major vendor.

To see other customer stories, visit CRM On Demand Success.

If you are interested in Siebel CRM or Oracle CRM On Demand -- or the future direction of CRM at Oracle -- then don't miss out on these key executive sessions:

S310669: Oracle CRM Executive Vision and Product Strategy Update
Speaker: Anthony Lye, Senior Vice President, Oracle
11:30 am - 12:30 pm, Monday, Oct. 12
Moscone West Rm 2002/2004

S311874: Planning for the Recovery
Moderator: Anthony Lye, Senior Vice President, Oracle
Analyst Panelists: Paul Greenberg, Denis Pombriant
1:00 pm - 2:00 pm, Monday, Oct. 12
Moscone West Rm 2009

S310674: Oracle CRM Executive Panel
Moderator: Anthony Lye, Senior Vice President, Oracle
Customer Panelists: ANZ Bank, HP, Scottish Widows Services, U.S. Foodservice
2:30 pm - 3:30 pm, Monday, Oct.12
Moscone West Rm 2002/2004

S311873: CRM Innovations That Have Helped Customers Transform the Way They Do Business
Moderator: Anthony Lye, Senior Vice President, Oracle
Customer Panelists: Groupe Carrefour, Siemens, Swedish Rail
2:30 pm - 3:30 pm, Tuesday, Oct. 13
Moscone West Room 2009

S310676: Making the Business Case for Investing in Siebel Release 8.1.1 and Beyond
Presenter: George Jacob, Group Vice President, Oracle
Customer Presenters: HP, Societe Generale
10:15 am - 11:15 am, Wednesday, Oct. 14
Moscone West Rm 3002/3004

Registered attendees can pre-enroll for these sessions now using Schedule Builder. If you have not yet registered, it's not too late!

Or even better, how can your customers find THE answer?

It just got a lot easier! Oracle announced the availability of an integration combining the capabilities of Oracle CRM On Demand with InQuira's On Demand Web self-service applications.

With InQuira knowledge management integration with Oracle CRM On Demand, customer service agents have access to knowledge across the enterprise, enabling them to seamlessly access answers right from within their normal service flow.

Even better, the combined solution allows customers to easily find answers to their own questions via self-service.

Not sure what this means to your company? Check out this blog posting by Natalie Petouhoff from Forrester Research.

Click here for more information on Oracle's announcement with InQuira.

It's less than 5 weeks away to Oracle OpenWorld, but it's not too late to register!

With more than 100 sessions devoted to Oracle CRM On Demand and Siebel CRM, there is something of interest for everyone, whether you are in Sales, Service, Marketing, or IT. See what's new, learn how other customers -- as well as Oracle itself -- are leveraging CRM to its fullest potential, and network with Oracle product experts, thought leaders, partners, and customers.

To find out more about specific sessions, demos, and networking opportunities, take a look at the Focus On guides for Oracle CRM On Demand, Siebel Sales/PRM/Order Management, Siebel Service, Siebel Marketing and Loyalty, and Siebel CRM Infrastructure and Technology.

Visit the Oracle OpenWorld page to plan, register, and enroll in sessions and activities.

Check in frequently or subscribe to this blog to make sure you get the latest CRM related updates for Oracle OpenWorld!

Preparation for your sales call is quick and insightful with Oracle's CRM On Demand.
The CRM On Demand architecture was built with one click in mind - one click to derive
insight immediately and align your sales team with trusted information.
Watch this great short demo produced by Cindy Erickson.

How many of you CRM folks have made your companies go green in an effort to reduce costs? A few ways you may have done it: the new E-Billing solution for paperless invoicing, paperless discount coupons, electronic mail for customer communication, the new E-Commerce channel or even when you started providing E-Service, service requests online or electronic documentation. Got you started thinking?

There is now a good opportunity to get some recognition for all that hard work. At Oracle OpenWorld 2009, Oracle will once again announce winners for the GREEN AWARDS. The Oracle 'Empower the Green Enterprise' award recognizes customers from a wide-range of industries that are using Oracle products to support their green business practices and sustainability initiatives in order to reduce environmental impact, costs and improve business efficiencies. Here is the nomination form to get the process started. Good luck and better hurry, the deadline is September 11th.

I don't know what it is, but lately it seems that all I've heard about is the importance of having a great system in place to ensure proper execution, consistency, and optimal productivity. At an intuitive level this makes sense. Would you hop on a commercial airliner if it didn't have a standardized and highly rigorous system...a checklist, that the ground and air crew followed prior to each take-off? I didn't think so.

In the sales world, we call such a system a "methodology," a standard and codified way that teams operate based on the status of a lead or opportunity, and/or in order to progress that lead or opportunity. Of course many companies with direct sales teams devise their own methodologies. But many more deploy and standardize on third party methodologies such as Miller-Heiman. On this front I heard a pearl of wisdom today from a senior executive at The Alexander Group, a firm with a strong expertise in sales and sales growth. He said, "It's far less important what the methodology is than that the company select one, and stick with it."

What does this have to do with Oracle? Well, Oracle CRM On Demand supports the embedding of standardized sales processes in its 'Sales Process Coach.' With this feature, companies can insert codified instructions at every step of their sales stage that align to their standard methodology, be it home grown or from a third party.

But what about those organizations that may be looking to save time and NOT embed this information in their CRM application? Well, that's where Oracle CRM On Demand Inner Circle Partner White Springs comes in. White Springs creates software solutions that integrate sales methodologies and skills training tools into Oracle CRM On Demand as well as Oracle's on premise CRM solutions.

Now, lest you think this blog post is running a bit long, you are correct. But this is an important topic and a timely one given the need for all sales organizations in the current environment to increase their efficiency, effectiveness, and consistency with the same or fewer resources.

So what are three "things" you should remember about the combination of Oracle CRM On Demand and White Springs? I asked the folks at White Springs to help me out on this one. Here they are.

#1) By embedding "off-the-shelf" sales training into Oracle CRM On Demand and on premise CRM applications, White Springs enables customers to implement their learning in the place it is most valuable.

#2) This embedding ties sales learning, analysis, preparation and execution together within the Oracle application, ensuring greater utilization of both the training content and the CRM platform.

#3) Among the results? Managers gain objective control over usage and ROI from sales training by applying the leading analytics capabilities that Oracle provides to their training implementation. They can now measure who is using the training content, who is getting the greatest benefit, and how it is impacting KPIs, among other elements.

Want to learn more? Please click here.

MarketSphere is a highly-respected professional services firm that has grown since 2002 to 250 employees in 11 offices. A mix of CRM systems and spreadsheets complicated pipeline planning and marketing event targeting. MarketSphere leaders chose Oracle CRM On Demand as a new enterprise-wide standard for sales and opportunity management. They happened to go live as the economy weakened. Nevertheless, deals sold are three times that of the previous year.

As Carl Yost, Group Managing Partner, says, "Making a commitment to Oracle CRM On Demand as our universal platform has enforced a discipline to our sales process and dramatically improved performance. It was an absolute savior during the economic downturn."

Read more in this great case study from Mainstay Partners.

Would you like a free 30 day trial to see what Oracle CRM On Demand can do for you?

Nominations are now being accepted for the 2009 Oracle Innovation Awards. You could win a complimentary 2009 Oracle OpenWorld conference pass.

We want to know how you have used Oracle CRM products to innovate your business. How has Oracle CRM On Demand or Siebel CRM changed the game for you? What lessons have you learn along the way? How have you transformed the way your business runs?

Categories range across the Oracle product lines, but we want to see how you've made CRM shine.

Don't worry! You don't need to write a long, fancy description of what you've done. Just show us! To enter, just create a three-to-five-minute YouTube-style video clip.

Click here for more information. Deadline for nominations is September 15, 2009, 5 p.m. PST.

You're away from the office and minutes away from a meeting with a prospective customer. You need to review details about the opportunity and customer, but you can't access the CRM data you need because you don't have connection to the Internet. Do you panic?

Not with Oracle Mobile Sales Assistant. Whether it's quickly associating a phone call you've just made or an email you've just sent to a prospect with an opportunity record in CRM or just accessing basic sales information, Oracle Mobile Sales Assistant works the way you do -- with or without network coverage. It's task-oriented, easy to use, and optimized for a salesperson just like you. And with Oracle Mobile Sales Assistant for Blackberry Version 2.0 released last month, you can fully leverage the touch screen capaiblities of the Blackberry Storm.

Oracle Mobile Sales Assistant is compatible with both Oracle CRM On Demand and Siebel CRM.

To learn more about Oracle Mobile Sales Assistant for BlackBerry and iPhone, click here.

To try Oracle Mobile Sales Assistant, click here.*

* Access to Oracle CRM On Demand, which is also available as a free trail, is required.

Did he say grow a business while reducing costs?

Yes, it can be done, says Malcolm Watkins, executive director of Australian Finance Group (AFG): "Over the past five years, we successfully implemented a technology strategy that has enabled us to grow our business while reducing costs, increasing our services and introducing new revenue streams."

AFG is using Oracle solutions to increase customer retention, extend the life of customer loans, acquire customers through online marketing strategies, cross-sell through direct marketing strategies, and drive down the cost of doing business.

Read this great case study on how AFG is leveraging Oracle applications such as Oracle's Siebel CRM, Oracle Enterprise Content Management, and E-Business Suite to transform their business.

Click here for other Siebel CRM customer success stories.

Join Accenture and Oracle to celebrate Chicago's most famous foods at APHSA. And sample Accenture and Oracle's wide assortment of leading human service industry tools and best practices.
When: Monday, August 31, 2009 --11:30 a.m. to 12:45 p.m.
Where: The Chicago Marriott Downtown Magnificent Mile,
540 North Michigan Avenue, Chicago, IL
5th floor, Salon AD
R.S.V.P.: Taste.Chicago@Accenture.com

Of course we like Oracle CRM On Demand just as it is. I mean heck...we work at Oracle!

But given that an ever increasing amount of a salesperson's time is spent on the go, it's critical that a mobile solution be part of one's CRM equation. Enter Oracle Mobile Sales Assistant, which works seamlessly with Oracle CRM On Demand to provide sales users with a powerful yet easy to use task-based application for conducting the most common activities while on the road

Yes, we've discussed Oracle Mobile Sales Assistant many times before on this blog, but come September 15th we're conducting a short, Web-based "Get Connected Workshop" that showcases this solution 'live.' Click here to learn more and register.

In Today's global environment, increasing customer satisfaction while lower costs is the key to remaining competitive. Learn how Oracle Contact On Demand can help you deliver a seamless customer experience across a multichannel environment to achieve greater customer loyalty, while simultaneously increasing agent productivity and reducing costs.

Don't miss the Oracle presentation at the Gartner CRM Summit in Scottsdale, AZ from September 14-16, 2009. Anthony Lye, Senior Vice President, CRM Applications will discuss Oracle's Complete CRM Solution. We will also be demoing the latest innovations in our On Premise as well as On demand CRM Solutions.

Listen to an interview with Anthony Lye, senior vice president of Oracle CRM, conducted by Stuart Lauchlan of MyCustomer.com, as he defines CRM in the current changing business landscape, how Web 2.0 and social media are changing the way companies acquire and retain customers, and how companies can leverage on premise, on demand, and integrated CRM models with the advent of cloud computing.

YES! says Luke Migalla, IT Manager for Sales & Marketing Tools at Siemens Building Technologies.

In a recent Oracle Reference Forum, Oracle CRM On Demand customer Pella discussed their integration to Oracle E-Business Suite using Oracle AIA. But what about integrating to SAP?

On Thursday, August 20th, Oracle hosts another customer reference forum, where Mr. Migalla will discuss Siemens Building Technologies' Oracle CRM On Demand implementation. Siemens Building Technologies provides integrated solutions, multi-faceted systems and high-quality product range for heating, ventilation and air conditioning control applications.

As part of an effort to streamline workflow processes, Siemens Building Technologies chose to implement Oracle CRM On Demand to help its sales team increase their effectiveness and efficiency.

Why does Siemens integrate between Oracle CRM On Demand and SAP? How did they do it? What impact has the integration had on their Oracle CRM On Demand users? What other benefits has Siemens achieved?

If you would like to participate on the August 20th call and ask Mr. Migalla your own questions, please contact your Oracle CRM sales representative.

Oracle's Life Sciences Rx Analytics Solution is the first fully-integrated CRM and Business Intelligence platforms offered in a service model (SaaS) for Life Sciences. It combines the trusted, industry-leading prescription sales information assets of IMS with the power of Oracle's leading-edge Business Intelligence analytics -- seamlessly integrated with Oracle CRM On Demand and Siebel CRM.

Net/net: Oracle and IMS offer a complete Rx Analytics solution that drives sales and marketing effectiveness with ready-to-act analytics.

See it in action within Oracle CRM On Demand, or visit our web site for more information.

Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Master Data Management of Customer Data positions Oracle Siebel Universal Customer Master in the Leaders Quadrant.

Oracle Siebel UCM is Oracle's leading customer data application for Master Data Management (MDM). It enables organizations to manage the entire life-cycle of customer data by centralizing information from heterogeneous systems to create a single view of customer information that can be leveraged across all functional departments and analytical systems.

Organizations are still investing in SFA is the news from analyst firm Gartner, with a slightly bigger investment in SaaS. The big news is that Oracle's CRM On Demand has now moved to the leadership quadrant.

Since the last report (2008), Siebel has advanced along the "Completeness of Vision" axis, and Oracle CRM On Demand has advanced significantly along the "Ability to Execute" axis — both within the Leaders Quadrant.

To learn more about Oracle's CRM On Demand click here
The Gartner Magic Quadrant for SFA Report is posted here

Thinking about going to Oracle OpenWorld? There is no better time to register than now. Oracle's Early Bird rates end Friday, August 14th. Not only will you get a discount on a full conference pass, you'll also get special hotel pricing.

Why come to Oracle OpenWorld? With more than 100 sessions focused on CRM, you'll have an opportunity to see what's new, learn how to maximize the potential of your CRM application, get answers to questions, and meet with Oracle product experts, partners, and other customers. Check out our Content Catalog to learn more about what sessions will be showcased in the Customer Relationship Management Track. The entire Oracle CRM suite -- Oracle CRM On Demand, Siebel CRM, E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft, and JD Edwards -- will be represented. Don't miss it!

Oracle's Life Sciences Sales Solution is the first CRM On Demand application to deliver Sales Force Automation with a pre-populated Data Mart. It combines the trusted information assets of IMS with the power of Oracle’s leading-edge Business Intelligence analytics, seamlessly pre-integrated with Oracle CRM On Demand.

So what? In an era of changing commercial models and declining profitability, this solution enables sales reps to gain new, actionable insights that drive daily sales activities. This is working smarter and more effectively – in real life. Watch this 5 minute "day in the life of a sales rep" demo by Johan Rook of the Netherlands.

Learn how Oracle CRM On Demand provides business leaders with unparalleled insight, plus the ability to increase productivity on their sales teams with an on demand CRM solution that provides superior value. Oh, and do all this...in three minutes and 15 seconds! Just click below.

On Thursday, August 6th, you can hear the real story. In an Oracle Reference Forum, Pella Corporation, a leader in designing, manufacturing, and installing quality windows and doors for businesses and homes worldwide, will discuss how they integrated Oracle CRM On Demand and Oracle E-Business Suite. How did they do it? How fast did they do it? What impact has it had on their Oracle CRM On Demand users?

You have probably heard about Oracle's Application Integration Architecture or "AIA". In case you haven't, here is a high level description: AIA offers prebuilt solutions at the data, process, and user interface level, delivering a more complete process solution to business end users. All Oracle AIA components are designed to work together in a mix–and–match fashion and are built for configurability, ultimately lowering the cost and IT burden of building, extending, and maintaining integrations.

Now, that's a pretty good marketing description, but what does that really mean and how do companies benefit from AIA? One key word that means a lot to IT organizations is "prebuilt". So, one of the real benefits of AIA is that you aren't starting from scratch or getting just a toolkit. Pella will discuss how Oracle’s out-of-the-box capabilities helped them quickly build an opportunity-to-quote process without having to design, build, and test the end-to-end system from scratch.

If you would like to participate on the August 6th call, please contact your Oracle CRM sales representative. Or click here to read more about Pella's implementation and here to learn more about Oracle's AIA.

That's the name of an article in this month's CRM magazine (don't ask me why, but these folks insist that for their purposes the "m" in "magazine" must be lower case). It's written by Jim Dickie of CSO Insights. Although I don't know him personally, I like Jim Dickie's writing in general, as well as the valuable quantitative information CSO Insights consistently provides.

In this article, Jim asserts that interest in mobile CRM is poised to take off because of three factors: 1) improvements in mobile devices themselves; 2) increased sophistication among users; 3) applications and software that are "finally" (Jim's term, not mine!) worth using.

I think these three points are dead on, but Jim sort of buries a "lead" a bit with an item he mentions in the 'improvements in devices' category. And it should qualify as a fourth point. Plainly and simply, it's the faster data speeds of networks themselves, combined with lower prices for unlimited data plans. An unlimited 'all you can eat' data plan is becoming more ubiquitously used at companies like ours. And while 3G isn't as fast as the throughput at your home or office, it's pretty darned speedy for data. How fast? Well, not that this has anything to do with the topic at hand, but this morning on the way to work I streamed WAAF, an FM rock station in Worcester, Massachusetts (3,000 miles from Redwood Shores), and listened to it...loudly...on my car audio system thanks to my iPhone. Not a big deal, you say, because streaming is old hat? It's a big deal! Streaming is a data hog, and I was driving in my car.

But I digress. Another item worth highlighting is Jim's third category. Oracle's approach in building mobile CRM applications "worth using" is to develop task-based software oriented toward the work styles of on-the-go sales people. Our approach is not about seeking to replicate CRM functionality on a smartphone. It is about providing an easy to access and always-on medium for accessing, consuming, and updating vital CRM information on the way to and from meetings.

If you'd like to learn more, click here. We also conducted an informative Webinar on mobile CRM last March with CRM magazine. One of the panelists was Yankee Group analyst Sheryl Kingstone, who has many great perspectives and GOOD DATA on this topic. I won't shamelessly plug our Oracle speakers or me (I moderated the Webinar). Oops...guess I just did.

Come hear how your Human Services organization can transform service delivery from
Oracle’s HHS Executive Director Kimberly Ellison-Taylor. At the APSHA conference during
August 30 to September 2nd, Oracle will highlight the capabilities of our solutions through:
- The Platinum Customer Reception
- One on one customer and partner meetings
- APHSA Platinum presentation
Come visit our exhibitor booth to setup a one on one discussion and review demonstrations
of Oracle Policy Automation, Siebel Case Management, Business Intelligence and key
Oracle technology offerings.

MOST any given Thursday morning, some of our finest sales consultants (I'm not kidding--these folks are really good) demonstrate Oracle CRM On Demand, our rapidly deployable and easy-to-use hosted CRM solution. Or we demonstrate Oracle Contact On Demand, our hosted contact center offering. Or for Oracle E-Business Suite customers, we demonstrate the prebuilt integration capability we offer that links EBS with Oracle CRM On Demand.

We alternate demonstrations of these solutions. But all the demos take place Thursday mornings at 9 a.m. Pacific time. We'd love to have you join us.

Click here for an invitation to see Oracle CRM On Demand in action on July 30th, August 13th, or August 27th.

Or click here if you're an Oracle E-Business Suite customer and would like to see how EBS and Oracle CRM On Demand can further drive sales effectiveness in your organization..

Or...click here if you'd like to see how Oracle Contact On Demand can dramatically increase call center flexibility and lower costs by deploying remote agents simply with a phone and an Internet connection.

Now I didn't mention this, but these are all Web-based demonstrations, and you'll have ample opportunities to ask any questions you may have. We're looking forward to your attending.

Some more good news for us here at Oracle. The latest magic quadrant for Gartner positions Oracle in the leaders quadrant for Master Data Management of Product Data. Read more about it here and for more information on Oracle Master Data Management click here.

The need to improve profits becomes more and more critical during our current economic times. Every executive is on the lookout for creative ways to improve the bottom line. One area that gets overlooked often is improving pricing initiatives within the enterprise. Every organization has pricing initiatives but are they truly followed? Pricing is often discounted and often there is no room for margins. These areas of revenue leaks are actually opportunities for improvement and profit. In addition, keeping the sales people aware of the customer, their buying behaviour and how they can offer the right price to the customer is critical and can facilitate in a successful deal or upselling. Oracle's Price Management Solution is a closed loop process that understands how price is created, executed and flows through the organization as a whole.
To learn more:
- Listen to this iSeminar on Smart Strategies for Uncertain Times, focusing on Oracle Price Management(approx. 13 min.)
- Read more about Oracle Price Management and read their datasheets here

OK, so I'm engaging in just a bit of headline hyperbole here, but several weeks ago the folks at Marketing Sherpa put out this Chart of the Week. Based on a survey of nearly 1,200 marketing contacts inside of B2B companies, only 51% of respondents are using CRM at their companies to manage their lead process, 44% are performing lead scoring, 44% are measuring the lead generation contribution to revenue...and so on.

The take-aways? 1) While many pundits will proclaim the CRM market is largely penetrated, this is clearly not the case. 2) There will always be room for process improvement inside of organizations of all types and sizes. And we at Oracle offer unmatched expertise in helping companies to not just successfully deploy CRM, but also to drive sales, marketing and service best practices in their enterprise.

Oracle recently introduced Oracle Loyalty Analytics, a great companion to Siebel Loyalty Analytics. Oracle Loyalty Analytics provides marketers end-to-end insight into loyalty program performance, enabling them to optimize loyalty programs, enhance partner and customer relationships, and increase program ROI. Out-of-the-box, Oracle Loyalty Analytics is integrated with Oracle's Siebel Loyalty Management to provide those users with deeper insight into the performance of their loyalty campaigns. The combination of Siebel Loyalty Management and Oracle Loyalty Analytics provide comprehensive capabilities to help you make the right customer loyalty decisions.

To learn more about Oracle Loyalty Analytics, see our web site and data sheet. To learn more about Siebel Loyalty Management, see our web site and data sheet.

Gartner predicts that "through 2012, more than 35 per cent of the top 5,000 global companies will regularly fail to make insightful decisions about significant changes in their business and markets" due to the lack of critical information, processes, and tools.

Business intelligence continues to be a top priority for CIOs in 2009 and going into 2010, surprising given that IT spending is flat. But, perhaps this isn't such a surprise after all. In difficult times, both during a downturn as well as when preparing for a recovery, visibility and insight into business operations and market trends are more critical than ever before to better control cost and operations, glean insights about customers and customer loyalty, and better respond to changing business conditions and market opportunities.

But doing so can take an overwhelming amount of time and resources. With Oracle Sales, Marketing, Service, and Loyalty Analytics, you can faster identify what products and customer segments are profitable and how to better optimize your workforce and business. To learn more, listen to this short iSeminar.

Gartner recently released a report on Enterprise Marketing Management (EMM). Gartner's definition of EMM encompasses the business strategies, process automation and technologies required to effectively operate a marketing department, align resource, execute customer-centric strategies and improve marketing performance.

Siebel continues to be in the visionaries quadrant with an improved position in "completeness of vision". There are no leaders or challengers in Gartner’s 2009 Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Marketing Management (July 14, 2009) due to low user adoption of EMM as a marketingwide platform.

For more information on our Siebel EMM suite, please click here

Equifax started early and fast with Oracle CRM On Demand and continues to have success across their sales organizations. In this video, Tripp Partain, CIO, Corporate Platforms, discusses Equifax's initial implementations of Oracle CRM On Demand. Equifax, a global leader in information solutions leverages one of the largest sources of consumer and commercial data, along with advanced analytics and proprietary technology, to create customized insights that enrich both the performance of businesses and the lives of consumers. The first Oracle CRM On Demand implementation at Equifax took less than sixty days!

To see other customer stories, visit CRM On Demand Success.

Oracle has developed a new version of the Oracle Policy Automation (OPA) Connector for Siebel CRM
as part of our continuing commitment to provide customers with solutions that deliver accuracy and
consistency in complex decisions and determinations for policies enterprise-wide.

OPA automates legislation and policy by using familiar tools including Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel to
model business rules in natural language. This allows rules to be developed directly by policy experts rather
than computer programmers. Key areas include eligibility and benefit determination; tax assessments; grant
processing; and immigration, visa, and passport eligibility.

Featured enhancements in Oracle’s Siebel Connector 2.0:
• Optimized for complex benefit determinations for health and human services
• Rulebase mapping screens inside Siebel
• High-speed integration with Oracle Determinations Server
• Out-of-the-box templates for use in Siebel workflow
• Simplified setup and configuration

Click here to learn more about Oracle Policy Automation.
Contact Heike Lorenz at heike.lorenz@oracle.com for additional information.

So trust me, I'm not going to do that. But what I can tell you is that several colleagues and I sat in on a briefing where we learned about upcoming enhancements to Oracle's Social CRM Applications. Are they unbelievably earth shattering? No. Will they further increase utility, however, with a range of net-new features based on user requests? Yes, they will. These enhancements are expected to be available...ahem...sometime in our current fiscal year (I told you I was going to stay on the right side of the law). You can learn more about these apps here, and in coming weeks we hope to bring you some short screencasts to provide more "show" than "tell." Please stay tuned.

Click here to learn about this web community on building and managing wealth. Help improve the Wealth Managers League and its content by filling out a brief survey on attitudes toward professional wealth managers. This will help shape the direction of the WML and become the basis of a new whitepaper for participants.
Sample Wealth Management community topics include: Venture Capital, Stocks, Bonds, Banking, ETFs, Investing, and Economics

Join a compelling live webcast with The Customer Collective on "Driving Demand in a Demanding Market", July 15th at 1pm PST / 4pm EST. REGISTER HERE

Creating - and driving - demand in today's market is all about having the best, real-time knowledge and using it effectively in a newly-networked world. The days of selling with a martini dinner and a golf game are all but over. Today's clients want to know that you are not going to waste the one commodity that is diminishing even faster than their budget: time. How can you, as a salesperson, develop a creative new strategy that will work to your advantage in this changing market?

Tune in to hear a panel of experts discuss the most effective ways of creating and driving demand.

Watch this great short demo on mobile capabilities, analytics and gadgets by Reg Hingley.

Tremendous amount of data is collected at various customer touch points within an enterprise. Most of the time the quality of this data is questionable.The ultimate goal for any enterprise is is to provide and use clean customer data to achieve lower costs and keep customers loyal. Companies even in today's economy are investing in improving their data quality. Four industry watchers shared their forecast on MDM earlier this year.

Oracle's Master Data Management (MDM) solution is a suite of products designed to consolidate, cleanse, govern and share master data across the applications footprint (including SAP) and business intelligence. Oracle MDM utilizes Oracle’s Application Integration Architecture to integrate the high quality authoritative master data into the IT landscape right out-of-the-box.
Zebra Technologies, a manufacturer of thermal transfer bar code printers, related supplies and label design software for bar code labeling applications has benefited by implementing MDM and AIA. Here is a webcast from two months ago, where you can hear directly from Zebra Technologies. To learn more about Oracle's MDM solution click here.

At Oracle we've attracted a lot of attention for our Social CRM applications. Many companies tell us that increasing sales productivity is one of their core goals, especially in this economy. This great new demo from our European colleague, Marielle Verschoor highlights our bundle of Social CRM applications that work together to help you dramatically improve sales productivity.

The Wall Street Journal and MIT Sloan Management Review recently published a useful reminder, to identify the kind of customers whose loyalty is worth having. The majority of customers whom many corporate leaders see as loyal, based on attitudes and actions, are not profitable. Loyalty is not synonymous with profitability.

Consider this:
* Profitable customers typically comprise only about 20% of a company's customers
* Break-even customers typically comprise 60%
* Unprofitable customers typically comprise 20%

Key take-aways: The loyalty measurement that matters most for corporate financial performance is the percentage of profitable loyal customers. An effective loyalty program will target and satisfy the wants of already-profitable loyal customers, and also work to increase the value of break-even loyal customers. For additional details, see the Sloan Management Review article.

For additional ideas, view Oracle's brief Smart Strategies for Uncertain Times: Siebel Loyalty Management Solutions webcast. To learn more about Siebel Loyalty Management 8.1.1, read the datasheet or visit our website.

Oracle is positioned in the Leaders Quadrant in each of the three new Gartner Magic Quadrants:
(1) Magic Quadrant for CRM Multichannel Campaign Management
(2) Magic Quadrant for Field Service Management
(3) Magic Quadrant for CRM Customer Service Contact Management

Gartner Magic Quadrants position vendors within a particular market segment based on their completeness of vision and their ability to execute on that vision. Siebel CRM helps organizations differentiate their business to achieve maximum top-and bottom-line growth. It delivers a combination of transactional, analytical, and engagement features to manage customer-facing operations across industries.

“Oracle Application Integration Architecture allowed us to quickly integrate Oracle CRM On Demand with our quoting system and other business applications, so salespeople spend less time tracking down information and more time selling.”
Teri Lancaster
CRM On Demand Project Manager
Pella Windows

Pella Windows, a leader in designing, manufacturing and installing quality windows, recently selected CRM On Demand to integrate with its existing set of applications. Pella has been an old Oracle customer and hence already had an established Oracle applications footprint. Read here for more details on how Pella is trying to give its sales a lift with the integrated CRM On Demand Solution.

Now is your opportunity to weigh in on topics you want us to include in Oracle OpenWorld 2009. Go to Oracle Mix today to see a list of sessions proposed for Oracle OpenWorld, including Oracle Develop, and vote for your favorites. We'll schedule several top vote-winners to be included in this year's conference. Voting is open until July 3 at mix.oracle.com.

Oracle CRM On Demand enables you to out smart and out execute your competition with solutions that are
easy to use, provide fast ROI and are available from a single vendor. Watch this short demo to see how an
executive can gain actionable insight for their business. This terrific demo was done by Kirk Thacker.

By Divya Malik on June 26th, 2009

Having a well executed content and collateral creation process is a big challenge for marketing folks. Collaborating efficiently on collateral, managing the approval process, knowing if the collateral is still current and not duplicating existing collateral.It is important to improve content collaboration both within the organization and with other departments/partners and channels. The ability to reuse existing marketing assets, improve the entire approval process, easily track and share existing assets, and finally find lower costs of creating and managing valuable assets is all critical to having a stellar content management system.

And content continues to still make a difference during the buying cycle. I came across an interesting study which states that "Tech Buyers Use Collateral for Purchase Decisions"

Siebel Marketing integrates with Oracle Universal Content Management (Oracle UCM) to allow marketers to find and leverage existing assets and reduce rework costs. Read more about Siebel Marketing and Oracle UCM.

Over the last few weeks we've been creating new ways for you to interact with us leveraging social media. Our goal is to keep you informed about what we're up to, share helpful tips, highlight interesting news in the CRM space and most importantly hear about your experiences and interests. As mentioned in the video above, there are six social sites/channels including this blog. Please take a look at what we created below. We hope that you join or follow each of these offerings. As always, we welcome your feedback. By keeping you informed and hearing what you have to say, we hope to help you make the most of your customer relationships.

Where you can find us and what you can do:

Follow us on Twitter

See Who's Talking About Us on Delicious

Join us on Facebook

Watch us on YouTube

See our Customer Success on Netvibes

Posted by Charlie Knapp

SK Broadband, one of the leading broadband services providers in Korea, has deployed Siebel CRM to enhance operational efficiency and customer service for Converged Broadband and Mobile Communication Services. With its new Partner Relationship Management System, SK Broadband has increased channel revenue and optimized the operation and management of its distribution network. The company has also improved profitability through streamlined distribution networks and reduced costs while providing differentiated converged services to customers.

“Oracle has allowed us to cut channel management costs and improve time-to-market of new services,” said a spokesperson at SK Broadband. “We are very pleased with the notable improvement in customer satisfaction.”

To learn more:
- Visit Siebel CRM
- Visit Siebel CRM Partner Relationship Management (PRM)
- Visit Siebel CRM Partner Portal

With the current economic climate, companies want to do more with less -- and that includes finding ways to get greater value out of existing enterprise applications. However, doing so isn't quite so easy. Oracle Application Integration Architecture (AIA) can help. Oracle AIA provides prebuilt integrations to common front and back office applications, including connecting Oracle CRM On Demand with Siebel CRM, Oracle E-Business Suite, and JD Edwards EnterpriseOne.

To learn more:
- Listen to this iSeminar on Smart Strategies for Uncertain Times, focusing on Oracle AIA and CRM (approx. 7 min.)
- View the Oracle CRM On Demand Integration Pack for Oracle E-Business Suite Flash Demo (approx. 3 min.)
- View the Oracle CRM On Demand Integration to Siebel CRM Flash Demo (approx. 3 min.)
- Read the Oracle CRM On Demand Integration Pack for JD Edwards EnterpriseOne Data Sheet

On July 8th at 10 AM PT, Brian Simmermon, VP & CIO at Subaru of America and members of his staff, will provide an overview of Subaru's implementation of Oracle's Siebel Marketing. Participants will also have the opportunity to ask the Subaru team questions.

Subaru of America, Inc. (SOA) is the exclusive United States marketer of Subaru products manufactured by Fuji Heavy Industries Ltd. of Japan. SOA serves nearly 600 dealers throughout the United States.

Subaru of America wanted to deepen its customer insights to drive more effective marketing, sales and service activities, so the company turned to Siebel Marketing. Siebel Marketing is helping SOA to more accurately assess customer loyalty and behavior through holistic customer ownership, rather than vehicle-specific profile data. Additionally, SOA has improved its marketing ROI by more accurately segmenting and targeting customers with personalized one-to-one campaign deliverables.

Registration is required for this forum. To register, please contact your Oracle CRM sales representative.

As a marketer, I observe this every time a recession hits. Constant fear of layoffs, major budget cuts for the marketing programs we have been working on and uncertainty. I am sure other marketers can relate to this as well. The main reason is the lack of accountability and lack of justification, because there is no visibility into where those marketing dollars are being spent. Large companies that often lose up to 20% of their marketing spend realize this situation and are now looking to automate key marketing processes and optimize their marketing investments. Press the 'Play' button below to hear what Deb Nelson- SVP Marketing and Alliances at HP has to say.

To learn more:

Read the Siebel Marketing Resource Management datasheet

In this video, Rosa Cintron, Project Manager at Agencourt Bioscience, discusses Agencourt Bioscience's implementation of Oracle CRM On Demand. Agencourt Bioscience Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Beckman Coulter, is a leading provider of nucleic acid purification products and genomic services for life science research. Agencourt's sales team was eager to use CRM On Demand since it provided better clarity in their accounts and increased productivity.

To see other customer stories, visit CRM On Demand Success.

There is clearly a lot of hype about CRM ROI out there. Oracle has developed a new program to unravel this hype and get to the real source of ROI. In this web video show that will be broadcasted on June 30th, you’ll see Oracle CRM customers from Government Agencies to Banks talk about how they delivered real ROI to their organizations.

Host Irene Ng will also interview Oracle Executives including Senior Vice President of CRM Development, Anthony Lye to uncover the next source of ROI in CRM.

To make sure you don’t miss this program and have a chance to engage in a live webchat with Oracle experts, register today.

In this video, Kristina Frazier-Henry, Director, Engine Business IT at Cummins, discusses Cummins' implementation of Oracle CRM On Demand. Cummins Inc., a global power leader, is a corporation of complementary business units that design, manufacture, distribute and service engines and related technologies, including fuel systems, controls, air handling, filtration, emission solutions and electrical power generation systems. Cummins replaced an existing call center application with Oracle CRM On Demand in six weeks! Now, they have great insight and trending of customer issues with CRM On Demand's analytics functionality.

To see other customer stories, visit CRM On Demand Success.

From time to time, I'll be posting tips on how to take advantage of the many ease of use features within Oracle CRM On Demand. Trust me when I tell you this application is indeed easy to use, with a graphical interface that models the way salespeople work.

So just what is today's tip? Easy! Make sure to leverage the "inline edit" functionality within the application. Doing this can save multiple mouse clicks and enable you to get your tasks done more quickly. For example, let's say you need to edit this record.

Instead of clicking on the "Edit" button, editing the field(s) you need to, and then clicking "Save," you can simply click your mouse on one of the fields, like "Account Name," make your changes, and click on the checkmark. For example, all you may want to do in this instance is change the abbreviation and spell out the word "Associates."

Depending on the extent of your changes, inline edit can save several mouse clicks for each interaction. And incidentally, don't let anyone tell you differently. Oracle was the first to introduce this capability into an on demand CRM application. Inline editing is supported in record List pages, record Detail pages, and in many linked records on main record Detail pages.

If you're not currently using Oracle CRM On Demand and would like a 30 day free trial, click here.

In this video, Ingmar Hermans, Director, Sales Operations at Kodak Graphic Communications Group (GCG), discusses Kodak GCG's implementation of Oracle CRM On Demand. Kodak GCG provides commercial printers, packaging printers, publishers, data printers, and enterprises with one of the broadest portfolios of technologies, products, and services in the graphic communications and document capture industries. Oracle CRM On Demand provides Kodak GCG with a consolidated CRM application and transforms sales processes with improved account and business intelligence.

To see other customer stories, visit CRM On Demand Success.

Is bigger better? Not when it comes to the number of partner vendors you need to work with to ensure SaaS CRM success. It’s not about having the biggest ecosystem in cloud computing – not when such distinction involves having to wade through a hodge-podge of tens or hundreds of vendors for the “right” solution – bigger is certainly not better.

The right partner ecosystem is all about having a select group of proven partners strategically chosen to complement product capability. Oracle CRM On Demand’s Inner Circle of partners provides just that by focusing on deeper integrations with a targeted set of strategic development partners to deliver much more than just a generic partner exchange of niche solutions.

Partner candidates are selected based on customer needs, market demands, and customer success. Each Inner Circle solution is carefully vetted with the Oracle CRM On Demand product team, fostering strong collaboration between the partner and Oracle to ensure each solution is tightly integrated. The end result? Unified solutions in complete alignment with Oracle’s product strategy and direction that solve complex business needs.

To learn more about Oracle CRM On Demand’s Inner Circle, click here.

Today's highlighted video features Kevin Raybon, General Manager, Sales Operations at NEC Unified Solutions, discussing NEC Unified Solutions' implementation of Oracle CRM On Demand. NEC Unified Solutions helps companies unify their business communications through innovative software, applications, development tools, and services. NEC Unified Solutions deployed CRM On Demand to their sales team in 45 days and is saving 200 hours of administrative time per month with CRM On Demand's reporting capabilities.

To see other customer stories, visit CRM On Demand Success.

If you’re considering an on demand CRM solution, you know that that there are a host of vendors out there to choose from. But rather than just comparing products on a feature-by-feature basis, I highly encourage evaluators to think at a more strategic level and consider not only the product, but also how the vendor fits in with your organization’s immediate and long-term goals.

Just a few things to consider:
- Does this vendor offer a roadmap of solutions and services to help your organization grow and react to changing business demands?
- Is there a strategy as to how this vendor’s CRM solution will coexist and integrate with other enterprise applications your organization depends upon?
- Does a relationship with this vendor bring value to your overall business?

Click here to download a white paper on these considerations and learn more!

Learn how David Bonnette, Group Vice President of Sales at Oracle, is responding to current conditions and optimizing productivity using Oracle CRM On Demand. Click here for a brief interview.

Listen here as CIO Editor Matt Rodgers speaks to Anthony Lye, Oracle Senior VP of CRM, about Oracle's CRM strategy, how the company is fending off the challenge from SaaS CRM vendors and what CIOs need to know about the latest trend in CRM solutions, Social CRM.

In this video, Wayne Sadin, CIO at Loomis, discusses Loomis' implementation of Oracle CRM On Demand. Loomis is an international leader in the cash handling services industry. Loomis replaced Salesforce.com with CRM On Demand and Contact On Demand to extend a successful Oracle E-Business Suite implementation and achieve a 360-degree view of sales, fulfillment, billing & service. Loomis leverages Oracle's Application Integration Architecture (AIA) to connect EBS and CRM On Demand.

To see other customer stories, visit CRM On Demand Success.

When people first think of Oracle and CRM, they think of Siebel CRM. After all, Oracle did acquire Siebel Systems in 2006, and with it came the cachet of the Siebel CRM brand. However, the acquisition also came with a SaaS offering– now known as Oracle CRM On Demand – that was perhaps overshadowed by its better known sibling.

Oracle CRM On Demand is not a copy of Siebel CRM. It’s not Siebel CRM stripped of functionality, and it’s not Siebel CRM hosted. It’s a separate, full-featured CRM offering that is offered as a service. It’s different from Siebel CRM, but at the same time it draws upon the 15+ years of CRM expertise and technologies that Siebel/Oracle offers. Take for example analytics. Oracle CRM On Demand leverages key components of Oracle’s Business Intelligence solution to offer high-end analytics to its users. And unlike other SaaS CRM offerings that are out there, Oracle CRM On Demand comes with a prebuilt data warehouse, so you can not only benefit from real-time intelligence but also leverage historical analytics to identify trends.

Is Oracle committed to Oracle CRM On Demand? Absolutely. Since 2003 when it was first released, Oracle CRM On Demand has gone through 16 releases. Just this past year, we’ve seen Release 15, Release 16, and an array of complementary products like Gadgets and Mobile Sales Assistant for iPhone that work with Oracle CRM On Demand. And because it is offered on demand, customers can reap the benefits of each release without the need to upgrade.

Check out a flash demo of Oracle CRM On Demand and visit crmondemand.oracle.com to learn more.

Oracle customer video with Søren Trærup Kjærsgaard, Business Systems Consultant at Ambu A/S, discussing Ambu's implementation of Oracle CRM On Demand. Ambu develops, produces and markets diagnostic and life-supporting devices to hospitals and rescue services. Ambu took advantage of Oracle CRM On Demand's rapid deployment and analytics capabilities to improve visibility and management of the sales pipeline and allow their sales reps to focus on closing opportunities.

To see other customer stories, visit CRM On Demand Success

In this video, Alex Nancekievill, VP Operations at ARM Ltd. overviews ARM's implementation of Oracle CRM On Demand. ARM is the world's leading semiconductor intellectual property (IP) supplier. Less than 3 months after implementing Oracle CRM On Demand, ARM began seeing benefits in sales forecasting, pipeline management, lead management and global account management.

To see other customer stories, visit CRM On Demand Success.

This video highlights some Oracle customers' comments on Oracle Social CRM. For more information, please visit Oracle Social CRM.

Have a great succes story or tips and tricks you want to share with the broader Oracle community? Based on attendee feedback from last year's Oracle OpenWorld, a public "Call for Papers" is open from now until April 26th (was formerly April 19th). Customers, partners, and employees are invited to submit their proposals and be a part of this hugely popular event. Click here to learn more!

Click here to submit a paper proposal.

For more information, please see the following links:

Oracle Press Release: Oracle Introduces Oracle® Gadget Wizard for Google Apps and Support for Google’s Secure Data Connector

http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/press/018179

Customers/Partners can download the Google Secure Data Connector by going to

http://code.google.com/sdc

Terms, conditions and restrictions apply.

Beta Information:

Please contact Mandeep Bhullar, Director, Product Management, CRM for further information on the Beta Program.

mandeep.bhullar@oracle.com

How customers interact with companies has changed, and how companies manage relationships with customers needs to change as well to take advantage of the new way people want to do business. This white paper expands on what Oracle defines as Complete CRM -- how organizations can better engage customers and users, manage customer transactions, and analyze results to adapt to and take advantage of changing business and economic circumstances to realize greater value from CRM.

Just a quick update that we've made it easier for you to keep up with our Oracle CRM updates. For one, we've moved the link enabling you to subscribe to this blog via RSS much higher on the right column, so it is one of the first things you'll see on this page. And we've also just enabled you to subscribe to this blog's updates via email, if you so prefer. Enjoy.

Oracle’s Siebel loyalty management solutions offer next-generation tools to help you maximize the value and duration of your most important customer relationships. View our new 4-minute demo to see how an airline uses Siebel Loyalty Management to gain competitive advantage, retain high-value members of their customer loyalty program, and deliver a superior member experience. To learn more about Siebel Loyalty Management 8.1.1, read the datasheet or view our website.

View demo now

On April 2nd at 10 AM PT, Todd Hauschildt, CIO at Verigy, will provide an overview of Verigy's implementations of Oracle CRM On Demand, Oracle Master Data Management and Oracle E-Business Suite. Participants will also have the opportunity to ask Mr. Hauschildt questions.

Verigy Ltd. provides advanced semiconductor test systems and solutions used by leading companies worldwide in design validation, characterization and high-volume manufacturing tests.

Learn why Verigy selected Oracle CRM On Demand over Salesforce.com and how Oracle allows them to spend less on technology and more on what they do best – innovation. Following the spin-off from Agilent, Mr. Hauschildt will outline the challenges Verigy faced and why they decided to implement Oracle’s CRM On Demand solution to improve sales forecasting accuracy, as well as to leverage and support functionality to better serve customers.

He will talk about how the solution allows Verigy to meet requirements of a configure-to-order, high tech business with global operations – without the need for software customization.

In addition, Mr. Hauschildt will explain how Verigy have reduced IT administration costs and streamlined business processes by leveraging Oracle CRM On Demand hosted model.

To register, please contact your Oracle CRM On Demand sales representative.

This short video introduces Oracle's Complete CRM strategy and explains why one-size-fits all CRM is a very limited and tactical approach. In this overview we highlight the various needs of CRM users and show how our solutions target to those individual needs while providing the comprehensive customer interaction data required to outperform your competitors.

In case you haven’t seen this article, you’ll undoubtedly find it of interest. Two main take-aways are:
1. CRM remains a major focus for business executives due to the importance of acquiring, developing and retaining customers profitably.
2. CRM is the No. 5 business priority in 2009 according to Gartner’s annual Executive Programs (EXP) survey of more than 1,500 CIOs worldwide.

Event Date: March 4, 2009
Live Start Time: 11 a.m. Pacific Time/2 p.m. Eastern Time
Event Duration: 1 hour

Mobile computing is gaining strategic importance in the enterprise workplace. Register for this Webinar sponsored by CRM Magazine and Oracle to learn how recent developments in Mobile CRM are improving sales user productivity by empowering reps while they're on the go. We promise a lively and informative dialogue. Panelists include:

Brent Leary sits down with Oracle's Senior Vice President of CRM, Anthony Lye to talk Social CRM. Tune in here.

This white paper, written by Ruth Donohue on our team, discusses current integration challenges facing businesses with mixed deployments and presents Oracle’s vision and solution for comprehensive integration with Oracle CRM On Demand.
Click here to read all about it.

On Monday, January 26th, Oracle Senior Vice President of CRM, Anthony Lye, hosted a very special webcast where he discussed:
Oracle's innovation and commitment
Oracle's ability to deliver faster time to business value
Oracle's unique pre-built integrations
How Oracle CRM solutions minimize risk and ensure security for your customer data

This webcast was all about Oracle's commitment to you and to enterprise grade on demand CRM. Check it out today.

When the economy turns around, as it will, how will your organization be poised to take advantage of the next expansion? Read the latest white paper written by Steve Diamond, Sr. Director, Product Marketing at Oracle, to learn six areas your organization can focus on to improve business results.

To win in this challenging economic environment, you must differentiate for strategic advantage. The latest release of Oracle’s industry-leading CRM suite delivers powerful new and enhanced capabilities in loyalty, self-service, marketing, sales and a variety of other functional areas.

Need to differentiate in this tough economic environment? Check out Siebel CRM 8.1.1 and start maximizing top and bottom line growth today.

Click here to listen to podcasts, view demos and read datasheets, solution briefs and white papers.

In December 2008, William Band of Forrester published an article titled Trends 2009: Customer Relationship Management. In summary the article highlights 6 key trends that Forrester believes will drive customer relationship management (CRM) strategies and technology adoption in light of the sudden and dramatic economic downturn.

1. The necessity to adapt to the rapidly changing “social” consumer

In 2009, companies will look to enrich the customer experience through community based interactions, and architecting solutions that are flexible and foster strong intra-organization and customer collaboration.

2. The need for more robust CRM strategies

During tough economic times, CRM professionals will retool their strategies with a focus on spotlighting the biggest opportunities for quick wins.

3. The requirement to build bulletproof cases to gain project funding

During this economic downturn, bulletproof financial arguments are needed to get funding for projects. In 2009, business cases must answer four critical questions: What are the business benefits? What is the impact on IT or project costs? Is future flexibility increased or decreased? How will risks be mitigated? CRM vendors will be challenged to provide clear and specific data about the business value their solutions can deliver.

4. The need to reduce CRM project risks

CRM professionals cannot afford failed CRM projects, particularly in tough economic times when business survival may be at stake.

5. The imperative to unlock the value of customer data

In 2009, CRM professionals will continue to focus intently on how enterprises collect, distribute, and use data to create value.

6. The battle to redress vendor pricing and licensing arrangements

CRM professionals will be working on sharpening their negotiating skills in an attempt to rein in costs and get more value from their vendor relationships.

If these trends identified by Forrester do become the drivers for CRM strategies during this economic downturn, Oracle is in a good position to address many of these trends.One example is Oracle's Social CRM applications not only addresses collaboration needs but can also be a quick win to increase productivity.

Read the AMR Research alert article to learn how Oracle is bringing SaaS/On Demand and Social Networking to the Partner Community.

Go to the Industry Analyst Reports page to download your own copy of the report. It can be found under Customer Relationship Management.

Building long-term loyalty that drives bottom-line impact

LIVE Webcast
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
1:00 p.m. EST / 10:00 a.m. PST
Don't wait, register now.

Loyalty is at the heart of an effective customer-centric strategy; identifying and retaining your best customers is always smart business. However, in this economic storm it is a matter of survival. Loyalty programs that work - i.e. those that drive overall profitability and customer lifetime value - are no longer a luxury; they're a "must-have" for all business models: B2B, B2C and B2B2C. Unfortunately, many programs today are expensive to run and constrained by costly, siloed and inflexible systems that make it difficult to quickly adapt and respond to changing customer behavior and needs, market opportunities, and competitive dynamics.

Join our free webcast to get expert advice on:
• The best practices of multi-channel loyalty management that improve the overall customer experience and lifetime value
• Crafting innovative, timely programs that deliver more relevant promotions and communications that drive desired customer behaviors
• Integrating partners more effectively into the loyalty process to boost program results

Interested? Then join us on Tuesday, January 20, 2009 1:00 p.m. EST / 10:00 a.m. PST for a live webcast.

Don't wait, register now.

Oracle's Siebel Loyalty is a next-generation solution for increasing the value & duration of your most important customer relationships.

Increase productivity while out on the road with Oracle Mobile Sales Assistant, available for Blackberry smartphones and Apple iPhone mobile devices. And, with Oracle Mobile Sales Forecast, available on iPhone, mobile sales reps can quickly access their sales pipeline and track expected and total revenue against sales quota.

To learn more:
- Read the Oracle Mobile Sales Assistant and Oracle Mobile Sales Forecast data sheets
- Visit our product page
- View 22-minute slidecast presented by Hody Crouch, Principal Product Strategy Manager
- Check out our free trial (requires valid Oracle CRM On Demand account)

Event Date: December 10, 2008
Live Start Time: 11 a.m. Pacific Time/2 p.m. Eastern Time
Event Duration: 1 hour

Similarly to how applications like Facebook and Twitter have changed how people communicate and interact within personal social networks, salespeople can take advantage of Web 2.0/Sales 2.0 technology to help boost their productivity and effectiveness, and your company's bottom line. Join Paul Greenberg, a leading CRM industry authority and best-selling author of CRM at the Speed of Light; David Bonnette, group vice president of CRM Sales at Oracle; and Steve Diamond, senior director of product marketing at Oracle for this highly informative webinar. Click here to register for the replay.

Event Date: December 11, 2008
Live Start Time: 10:00 AM PST / 1:00 PM EST
Live Event Duration: 1 hour

Don't miss the opportunity to listen to George Jacob Group Vice President, CRM Applications and Alok Pareek, VP of Technology, GoldenGate Software discuss how customers can successfully upgrade their Siebel environments with zero downtime and vastly improve transition success.
Register here

New E-Billing Webcast and Solution Factory
Since 50-80% of all customer service inquiries are related to bills, E-Billing is the cornerstone of truly effective customer self-service. Oracle Self-Service E-Billing solutions are the most adopted solutions are the market with over 200 million end users. The offerings allow businesses to forge deeper and more profitable relationships with their customers. Last month we conducted a webcast featuring payments expert Richard Crone. Richard discussed the latest trends in E-Billing and Customer Self-Service. He also shared valuable insight into how the right E-Billing solutions can enable your business to gain as much as $25 for every consumer adopting the solutions.
Richard K. Crone leads Crone Consulting LLC, helping financial institutions, billers, merchants, payment networks, processors, start-ups and investors transform payments from a cost of business to revenue-producing new lines of business.

Click here for the webcast replay. Click here for access to our new E-Billing Solution Factory.

Last week, The Customer Collective, an online forum sponsored in part by Oracle, hosted a highly informative webinar featuring industry analyst Denis Pombriant; author Jill Konrath (Selling to Big Companies); David Bonnette, a group vice president of CRM Sales here at Oracle; and hosted by Robin Carey of Social Media Today. If you're interested in hearing a wide range of perspectives on how to optimize selling opportunities in the current economic climate, then this webinar is a very worthwhile listen.

Increase your sales close rates by improving collaboration within your social network with more effective and targeted presentations and messages. Oracle Sales Library is a collection of shared content, which sales persons can rate, tag, comment on, and leverage to build the best presentations for advancing their sales opportunities. The Oracle Sales Library Solution Brief discusses on how to leverage social intelligence to deliver world class presentations.

Martin Nitsche, Head of CRM Systems at Dresdner Bank, and a recent attendee at Oracle's CRM Executive Summit in Paris, provides an interesting perspective on how the mindset and behaviors of its customers have changed in the last 10 to 20 years, and how the bank has evolved its CRM strategy. Thanks to Oracle's Sandra Wasseur for forwarding this video.

Siebel CRM 8.1.1 has arrived. Oracle announced today the next version of Siebel CRM 8.1.1. Designed to help you retain and grow customer relationships in this tough economic environment, Siebel CRM 8.1.1 enables a personalized, consistent customer experience that increases loyalty and profitability.
It is the most “Complete CRM” solution on the market - a combination of transactional, analytical, and engagement features to manage your customer facing operations & maximize top and bottom line growth. Read the press release and be sure visit our website.

Sales is tough – always has been, always will be. To succeed, today’s sales people must not only work very hard, they must work very smart. Sales productivity solutions from Oracle like, Mobile Sales Assistant and Social CRM offerings give sales reps the competitive edge needed to win deals. Ruth Donohue on the CRM Product Marketing Team has developed a Mobile Sales Assistant Solution Brief. Read on to learn all about Mobile Sales Assistant.

The Oracle CRM On Demand Integration to Siebel CRM creates a single customer view across on premise and on demand CRM deployments by synchronizing key data between Siebel CRM and Oracle CRM On Demand. Now, your company can benefit from a comprehensive end-to-end on premise and on demand system with a single view for conducting, managing, and analyzing customer interactions.

Ruth Donohue on the CRM Product Marketing Team created a great Flash Demo to tell this integration story. Check it out.

Read our latest white paper produced by the CRM Product Marketing Team's Steve Diamond along with TechDirt, Social Media Today and the Customer Collective. Sales 2.0 White Paper: How businesses are using online collaboration to spark sales.

Social CRM Applications are user-focused productivity solutions that leverage collective knowledge from your broader sales community. Fully integrated with your on demand or on premise CRM and other critical enterprise data, these applications help users sell more while entering less data. This 4 minute Social CRM Flash Demo produced by Ashley Niedenthal on the CRM Product Marketing Team will show you how Social CRM applications can help you generate more leads, identify references, develop sales campaigns and collaborate to win market share. Take a look.

Oracle Sales Prospector, an Oracle Social CRM Application, is designed to help salespeople generate and focus on more productive deals. The solution mines and analyzes information across internal systems and public sources to recommend top prospects, identify potential references and analyze purchase capabilities. Check out this new 3 minute Sales Prospector flash demo produced by Ashley Niedenthal on the CRM Product Marketing Team to see this hot new product in action.

Register Today for a Live Webcast where you will learn how the latest release of Siebel CRM 8.1.1 will help you keep and grow your customer relationships in times like these.
On Wednesday, November 12th at 8am PT | 4pm ET, join Anthony Lye, Sr. Vice President of CRM here at Oracle for a live webcast announcing the latest release of Siebel CRM 8.1.1. This is a webcast you do not want to miss. Click here to register.

Oracle Social CRM is an exciting new family of sales applications that increase end-user productivity by providing sales professionals with the tools they need to accelerate the sales cycle. Watch this slidecast, presented by Mark Woollen, VP Social CRM, to learn how your organization can use these applications to increase user adoption and make your sales teams more productive.
Oracle Social CRM Applications Strategy Overview And Roadmap

Learn about new reporting highlights for Siebel users including rich BI Publisher functionality for end users, numerous report generation options and available integrations. Also, please drop CRM Product Marketing a note if you are interested in another integrated audio/slide OOW presentation.

Planning for business continuity and disaster recovery are absolutely essential to take risk out of your business. Watch this 30 minute slidecast presented by Adam May, Director of Product Management, to learn why Oracle CRM On Demand Enterprise Grade SaaS solutions are best suited to protect your business in the event of a catastrophe. Adam will discuss Oracle’s current flexible and reliable SaaS offerings and he’ll lend insight into the product roadmap.

Here is the Siebel Sales Overview and Roadmap presented at Oracle Open World 2008 in San Francisco. Sonia Wadhwa from Siebel CRM Sales Product Management talks about features, benefits and value of Siebel Sales 8.0 and Siebel Sales 8.1, Social CRM sales applications, Voice applications and how social communities are driving business innovation in the current marketplace.

Watch this slidecast presented by Manoj Tahiliani, Sr Mgr, Customer Data Strategy on how the addition of a Data Management layer under your CRM applications ensures consolidated, clean, unique and consistent customer information.

Here's a great new overview for Sales Prospector just completed by Divya Malik on the CRM Product Marketing team. Link to it here.

Thanks to Sandra Wasseur from Oracle's EMEA Marketing Team for sharing this video with us, an interview with Gary Slater, Head of Business Systems at Business and Enterprise North East, a public-sector organization based in Seaham, England.

Here's a new slidecast prepared by Divya Malik on our team based on an OpenWorld presentation from George Jacob, GVP of CRM Development, and some of our customers.

Real ROI: The Business Case for Upgrading to the Latest Release of Oracle’s Siebel CRM

Continuing our series of videos, at Oracle OpenWorld 2008 we sat down (actually we stood up!) with Denis Pombriant, Principal of Beagle Research, to hear his perspectives on the broader CRM market and Oracle Social CRM.

We are not sure what happened, but it really looks like these applications are going to be popular.

So this started with a dare....to myself. I wanted to find a way that would be very authentic and accessible to convey stories about what is going on in the Oracle CRM ecosystem. I wanted to show the real people behind our products as well as customer and analyst reactions to and experiences with our products. Information Week reported several months ago that you needed at least a 10,000 dollar video creation and editing setup to do decent online videos. I thought we could do it for a tiny fraction of this, while maintaining quality. More on our setup in future posts. Our first filming effort was at Oracle OpenWorld. I mostly pointed the camera at our resident ham and my partner in crime on this approach, Steve. Steve then did a fantastic job of editing this video. There are a several more to come and we hope to make this a tradition for how we communicate what's happening in the CRM product line at Oracle.

In this first video Paul Greenberg, CRM Industry Expert, Top Blogger, and author of CRM at the Speed of Light comments on his reaction to the Social CRM presentation overview he had just seen at OpenWorld. Enjoy.

The CRM Product Marketing team would like to dialogue with our customers about the new things that are happening with the CRM product line. We'll be posting our new content here as well as pointing out interesting news. Please subscribe via RSS and stay tuned.