Industry observer Chris Kanaracus has reported that Oracle (News - Alert) announced the 17th version of its on-demand CRM solutions application, making "a fresh push into pharmaceutical sales with a Life Sciences edition of the software."

New features in CRM on Demand Release 17, Kanaracus says, include tools for managing sales pipelines and performing forecasts of future business; a redesigned user interface; and added language support.

"Pharma sales is a different kettle of fish than almost anything else in CRM," Beagle Research analyst Denis Pombriant wrote in a blog post cited by Kanaracus. "Sales reps never actually sell their wares to actual customers. They sell to the major recommender, the doctor, and even the MD doesn't buy anything. He or she simply writes a prescription. So you have this odd situation where the sales person is there simply to influence the recommender."

New forecasting capabilities in the release, according to Oracle officials, include flexible fiscal calendars for more productive business operations, the ability to perform both revenue and product quantity forecasting and real-time information comparisons against current and historical forecasts for proactive pipeline management.

To increase sales productivity, "Oracle CRM On Demand Release 17 introduces usability enhancements and a newly redesigned user interface that enables sales teams to resize it to their preference, quickly navigate to relevant information with the new Head-Up Display, better manage lists, and customize field labels in Oracle Mobile Sales Assistant," Oracle officials said.

Oracle CRM On Demand Release 17 is engineered to maximize pipeline management with automated time-based workflows to manage sales, marketing, service and channels, while enabling accelerated time-to-value and accurate and timely updates.

"Pharmaceutical sales representatives deal with rafts of paperwork and product samples, and therefore historically tend to leave their laptops in the car when pitching products to physicians and then perform data entry at the end of the day," said Anthony Lye, senior vice president of Oracle CRM told Kanaracus. "Depending totally on mental recall can be a painful process and also leads to inaccuracies."