It's life Jim, but not as we know it

We recently set up some Twitter feeds as an experiment - to help promote communication amongst our development communities, our partners and also a means to do some marketing. (search for CRM on twitter...). We didn't publicise or discuss this with anyone (it was an experiment after all) - but we were amazed to discover, after a few days, that we had 20 requests from people to follow our feeds... [that's not the point of this posting - but I thought I would mention it anyway]

As an experiment, I also set up a CRM instance to publish events to a Twitter feed - without coding or configuration. (The write up is posted here http://wiki.oracle.com/page/Publish+events+from+CRM+OnDemand+to+Twitter+in+3+easy+steps if you want to follow along. ).

Now you are probably thinking "What's the point?". Well - ask yourself this: wouldn't you just like to know, be more aware, of the things going on around you? Wouldn't you like to know what has been going on at an account that you may have worked at (whether you're in sales or worked on solving a problem or rolled out a project)?

Let me explain with a simple example. I am going to refer to a fictitious product called Chirp - which you can just imagine is a secure Twitter for the Enterprise

Susan, sold software at Parkers, 6 months ago. She has since moved onto working with a new set of customers. The account team, working with the customer implementation team have just released phase one of the CRM application. It has been a successful launch. The project lead posts a message on the Chirp channel provisioned automatically for that account (or it could be a semi-public channel for the company). The project lead also posts that the CRM champion has just been promoted.

Susan picks up the message on Chirp (she gets any feeds regarding Parkers). She sees that the project has gone live and her contact at the account has been promoted and is no longer a part of the CRM team. This is both good news and bad. The good news is obvious - but the bad news is that she will need to establish a working relationship with her contact's replacement if she wants to sell more to the customer. Chirp helps her stay aware of events that would normally go unnoticed in the CRM system.

In this simple example the Twitter-like tool can amplify the message to those who are interested in a specific topic, in this case, life events that could affect future business. The project team did not know the sales team. The message went out to anyone within the business that had subscribed to that channel - meaning that they were interested. Using Email to that would have been either a) too much effort for the project lead to figure out who to send the email to or b) would be as welcome as SPAM if sent to all....

As we begin to understand that CRM 2.0 is about the customer engagement and less about managing the relationship - we also need to understand that these social media tools have a big part to play in improving that engagement. These social media tools have been built in the open domain and as a result often need to respect the security and constraints of business. Today we're looking at how existing mechanisms (such as being on the sales team) can be used to provision channels for the user auto-magically - and give the user a choice of feeds to subscribe to - tailor made for the individual.

Rejoice!! You can now download Oracle VM templates for Siebel.

Click here edelivery - and look under Under Oracle VM templates.

What is it?
Two Oracle VM templates.
One is the Oracle Database configured with the Siebel 8 schema.
The other comprises the Siebel Application server, gateway server web server.

It's all running on Oracle software (Oracle Enterprise Linux, Oracle HTTP web server, Oracle 11G).

What do you have to do?
Download and unzip the files.
Spend about 30 minutes setting up the Oracle VM templates to work on your network/domain.
Then start Siebel - as it ships out of the box - but without the boring stuff (i.e. install and reading manuals).

What is the point
Well, beyond the obvious benefit - of getting your Siebel instance up and running in less time than it takes to order / deliver pizza - here are some of the benefits that you can enjoy through the use of Oracle VM :
a) you cut energy costs (electricity, oil, steam - whatever you power your data center on) through virtualisation - you can share the same hardware for multiple purposes - fire up a Siebel instance on demand ....
b) you cut water costs - because you are using less hardware and need less water to cool your servers
c) you cut your real estate costs (less hardware = less floor space)
need I go on?
In short, leveraging Virtualisation has, at a macro level, a greater impact on TCO than any one feature that we could build into any product. Period.

So if you are interested in Siebel 8, Siebel on Oracle Enterprise Linux, looking at an Enterprise class application running on Oracle 11G - stop reading this blog and get yourself to edelivery......

A good friend of mine was scoffing at my Facebook posts and said that posting any status update on a social network was a complete and utter waste of time. OK - we're each entitled to our own opinions - but sometimes - even the most flippant of actions can lead to positive effects. Let me demonstrate using a simple example that happened to me. (I should state that I have no particular preference for Facebook over any other social networking site):

I was travelling to New York a few months ago, so posted an update on Facebook - if anyone was around - they should ping me. An old colleague of mine from Oracle UK posted that he just happened to be in New York and was leaving the next day. We met up at JFK for a beer and had a chat about what was happening at HQ and in the UK. I found out that he had built a composite application using some Oracle applications, wired them up with BPEL and used web center as the front end. The customer (Pharma) loved it - and pretty soon customers in the US were finding out about the solution as well. At their request he had flown over to NY to demonstrate the solution. He got the inside scoop in all the 2.0 work we are doing at HQ. It was good to see an old friend - but we both had mutual benefit from the meeting - we became more aware....

So let's take a step back and reflect.....
I was heading to NY. I wanted to connect. Using traditional media I could have:

a) phoned everyone I could think of and say "Hi I'm going to NY. Are you going to be there too?"
b) or emailed everyone and ended up on their SPAM filter

Perhaps my friend didn't think this through enough - but it's clear that traditional media just does not scale. Recall how we used to live before mobile phones? You had to find a call box before making a call?

Here we see a simple posting on a social network site can have mutual benefit for those parties interested in the post. We could apply the same concept to many use cases in CRM or Supply Chain or other line of business. Instead of posting where I was - I could be posting a request to supply some raw material, or for someone to manufacture a part or for someone to help me spend my loyalty points .....

The views expressed on this blog are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of Oracle.