Oracle announced the Oracle CRM On Demand Release 19 Innovation Pack at the Oracle OpenWorld event today in San Francisco.
The release includes an enterprise marketing component enabling marketing professionals to build and manage campaigns, Web sites, and other customer-facing documents. It also includes lead management capabilities as well as role management and segment targeting.
In addition to the marketing features added to Oracle CRM on Demand, there is also a hosted contact center capability introduced in this release.
Presumably, much of these marketing features are the bearing of fruit from the Market2Lead acquisition last year. Oracle's expansion into a marketing automation platform demonstrates continued investments into SAAS and CRM On Demand, enabling it to compete more against entrenched SAAS stalwarts such as Salesforce.com
With marketing automation being added to Oracle's CRM on Demand platform, high quality and comprehensive data at the foundation becomes an even greater imperative. Fortunately, StrikeIron's integration of its Contact Data Verification Suite into the Oracle CRM On Demand platform will play an even greater role in the success of Oracle's SAAS initiatives going forward with this new announcement.
In addition, StrikeIron's mobile messaging solutions can play a significant role with the new campaign capabilities introduced today, as it does with many customers currently using it on other marketing automation platforms as part of critical mobile campaigns.
Oracle's
OpenWorld kicked off this week in San Francisco. CEO Larry Ellison gave the keynote last night where he introduced and highlighted the Exalytics Intelligence Machine, a new in-memory appliance that utilizes data compression and also storing data in DRAM (Dynamic Random Access Memory) to substantially increase business data analytics performance. It analyzes data "several times faster" according to Larry, enabling the scanning of 200 GB/sec of data, enabling "questions to be answered before they are even asked."
This and other announcements highlight what should be a great conference and show. It will be interesting to see if Oracle provides increased clarity around some of the following questions this week, such as:
What are Oracle's long-term Java plans? Will it continue to remain open post-acquisition of Sun, or can we expect to see a flurry of Java-licensing lawsuits such as the current one with Google they may cause some to doubt its interpretation of "openness"?
Will Oracle continue to move into larger-scale systems, including more hardware offerings, to compete with IBM and SAP? Oracle currently has sold over one thousand of its Exadata machines to date, so it is currently heading in this direction.
Will Oracle continue to push the "Public Cloud", or will it steer customers and the industry more towards its "Private Cloud" solutions that are "more secure" but also require individual software purchases rather than time-shared subscriptions?
Now that Fusion Applications have been made available on Cloud, on-premise, and mobile platforms, where is is the collection of offerings and integration with other Oracle platforms headed from here?
Will it continue to add more features and capabilities to its On Demand applications, such as CRM On Demand? Its acquisition of Market2Lead last year demonstrates its advance into On Demand marketing automation platforms.
StrikeIron, as an Oracle Gold Partner, is expressly interested in the future direction of Oracle and where the company is headed. Currently, our
collaboration with another Oracle partner, ActivePrime, enables us to deliver an integrated customer data quality solution to the Oracle CRM On Demand platform. Also, offerings such as our
customer data quality solutions and
mobile messaging solutions are available for integration into Oracle's broad stack of applications, products, and platforms. All of the great database innovation in the world won't help if it's not running on top of high quality, complete, and accurate data.
StrikeIron will be exhibiting at Oracle's Open World event at the Moscone Center in San Francisco next week, September 19th through the 23rd.
We will be demonstrating our Contact Record Verification Suite and other easy-to-integrate Web services product offerings that help an organization maintain a base of high quality, comprehensive, current customer data in a substantially easier way than ever before. Great customer data is a key component of success when working with various products underneath the Oracle offering umbrella.
This will also be a great opportunity to meet several members of our team for existing and prospective customers, as well as engage in deep-dive discussions about our technology, products, and how better data within business processes, products, systems, and Web sites can provide substantial ROI.
In addition to our own demonstrations, there will be partner demonstrations also at the event.
We will also be discussing our plans around Oracle's forthcoming Fusion Applications launch.
Hope to see you there!