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Oracle, Hot or Not?

Does Oracle “get” CRM 2.0? Depends on who you ask, apparently. I waited until the hotshots have spoken and can now stand atop their shoulders and look at the bigger picture. Which one, you might ask? The one composed of both clear victories and dangerous misconceptions.

Let’s get down to business.

Oracle has peppered its Release 15 of CRM On Demand with Web 2.0… thingies. The gist of which I can summarize by quoting Larry Dignan of ZDNet’s BTL blog:

  • Oracle CRM On Demand can be customized via widgets, gadgets and personal portals.
  • Can incorporate information such as contacts from iGoogle or MyYahoo. Other sites can be added via RSS.

Widgets, gadgets, thingies. Thinkies? Not really. If all there was to Web 2.0 was widgets, then yes, it would seem that Oracle has it covered. The one part of Web 2.0 ecosystem, the driving part that has gone largely unnoticed by traditional vendors, is the behavioral shift from consumption to co-creation, from listening – however passively – to conversing. Which has led some, for instance Christopher Carfi, to comment:

While an interesting technical step forward, the fundamental embrace of true, big-R customer Relationships is still missing. The product, the presentation, the glossy online video demo — it’s not about the Customer — it’s all about how the two fictional sales reps are closing the next deal

Indeed. It’s still a tool sold to empower businesses to “take on” their customers, to get to know as much as they can about them, so that they can sell to them, better.

Not that there is anything wrong with that, of course.

But it’s not just a technical step forward. Look, CRM 1.0 was all about building silos. Actually, about connecting multiple company siloes and merging them into a single one. An intra-company bible of everything the company knows about the customer.

Which isn’t much, really, but you would wait a long time before a CRM vendor would admit that. Or the company itself, for that matter.

That businesses now realize there is a world around them, full of information and interactions that are relevant to their business, is huge. No dancing around that. Opening up that big CRM silo and mashing it with outside bits and bytes amounts to a small revolution. Let me re-play the second bullet from Larry Dignan’s post:

  • Can incorporate information such as contacts from iGoogle or MyYahoo. Other sites can be added via RSS.

Yes, it’s the on-demand version of Oracle CRM, and the on-site users might wait a bit before Oracle hits them with Web 2.0 goodness. On-Demand is supposed to be sexy, after all. It has to. But still: this is no small feat. The hierarchies, the business rules, the workflows written in stone; all that is getting disrupted by this innocuously looking feature.

Once you let the devil in, there is no going back.

I believe Oracle will not lead the CRM 2.0 wave. Not because of their product legacy, not because of their customer legacy. And primarily not because CRM 2.0 won’t be a shrink-wrapped product but rather a loose collection of rather cheap yet very effective tools: company blogs that promote actual human contact between the organization and its customers, wikis that let the company innovate with, not only for, its customers, etc. You know the drill.

Still, it’s heart-warming (yes, about time we sing Kumbaya) to see actual progress done by the software behemoth. And it provides some clues about acceptance of Web 2.0 mindset by large organizations. May that be a sign of good things to come.

March 18, 2008 | Filed Under CRM, Rants 

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