Virtual Office Resource

Oracle (News - Alert) is not a company that sits back for long while competitors eat up market share.

Proving that point, on Thursday it announced it has penned an agreement to acquire the small San Francisco-based company InQuira (News - Alert), provider of service knowledge management software for web self-service and agent assisted service that counts more than 85 blue-chip companies as customers, that PCWorld says include Yahoo, 3M (News - Alert), Sprint and AVIS. No details on the terms of the agreement, which is expected to close later on this year, were revealed.

“The acquisition of InQuira provides Oracle with a complete knowledge management suite, integrated with self-service support, online customer forums and agent-assisted CRM,” said Anthony Lye, SVP of Oracle CRM.

Some news sources  indicate that they believe Oracle’s desire to buy InQuira was motivated by Salesforce.com (News - Alert) and Microsoft taking leading roles in the Software as a Service (SaaS) and CRM spaces. Writing for Yahoo, Jim Finkle said, “The acquisition comes as Oracle looks to catch up with Salesforce.com in the business of providing software as a service that is delivered over the Internet.” He elaborated, “Salesforce.com sells software for managing call centers that its customers access via the Web using an ordinary browser. It also sells software used to manage corporate sales activities.”

Nicholas Kolakowski noted in eWeek that “Microsoft (News - Alert) rolled out Dynamics CRM Online, the cloud version of Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011. For its part, Microsoft has emphasized how customers can use the cloud platform in conjunction with Microsoft software such as Office—in effect, creating a supple competitor to Oracle’s integrated hardware-and-software stack.”

Regardless of its competitive motivations, the combined solution will be offered to aid call center customer service reps to more intelligently answer customer inquiries as well as allow customers to find answers on their own online via community forums and self-service portals.

 “We expect InQuira to be the centerpiece for Oracle Fusion CRM Service. With InQuira, Oracle will provide an integrated suite of proven solutions that deliver a comprehensive and highly personalized experience for every customer, across all channels.”

 Confirming the anticipated result of the two companies joining forces, Mike Murphy, CEO of InQuira said, “With integrated knowledge management, companies have the ability to capture, create, understand and deliver the right answers when customers need it. We are excited to join Oracle and offer a comprehensive cross channel customer support solution.”

Analyst Ray Wang, CEO of Constellation Research was quoted in PCWorld as pronouncing InQuira “one of the top knowledge management vendors in the business." The piece further explained, “While knowledge management is ‘a critical component’ of CRM systems, most have ‘a big gap in this area,’” according to Wang who also was quoted in the article as saying, “They've [InQuira] been positioning for a sale to Oracle or SAP for the past 24 months."

In other news, TMCnet reported, SquareTwo Financial announced that it has deployed Oracle (News - Alert) Exalogic Elastic Cloud and Oracle Exadata Database Machine to run its debt management software, 'eAGLE.'