Oracle Evaluates Southeast Asia, Pacific Efforts

Oracle (News - Alert) officials say recent growth in India and Southeast Asia and Australasia has gained the vendor “a wide following” for its social CRM product, CRM On Demand, across a range of industries including automotive, communications, financial services and non-profit.

 

The vendor points to contracts in the last 15 months with companies that chose Oracle CRM On Demand included EBZ Online and Fine Organics Industries in India, Alphawest Services, BP Australia and The Business Store New Zealand in Australasia and 3M (News - Alert) Taiwan, Sinova Management Consultancy and Miramar Hotel & Investment in China, as well as Korea’s Sejong Telecom and Indochina Capital in Vietnam.

 

David Mitchell, Senior Vice President, IT Research for Ovum (News - Alert), has recently authored a report cited by Oracle officials, noting that most CRM systems support “limited amounts” of collaboration and “do not adequately provision for more variable, less structured collaboration in the real world.”

 

While bringing some team collaborative tools into the process “can help to carry out less formally structured processes,” Mitchell said, “there is still a need for an integrated set of collaboration with the right mix of capabilities for sales, marketing and services, and with the right integrations into the underlying CRM systems.”

 

Almost exactly a month ago, TMC reported that The TAS Group, a vendor of sales effectiveness products, announced that two of its products, the TAS Select Live! for Opportunity Management and TAS Select Live! for Account Management, were upgraded to support Oracle's CRM On Demand.

 

According to TAS officials the new capability, building on the existing support of Oracle's Siebel CRM, means that the Oracle CRM Platform and The TAS Group's sales methodology, process and technology are available in an integrated on-demand package.

 

Built on Siebel’s CRM application, Oracle CRM On Demand is engineered to help companies use data and information about customer relationships contained in blogs, social networks, online communities, shared bookmarks and mashups.

Simon Banks, General Manager, CRM On Demand, Oracle Asia Pacific, called the Oracle Sales Prospector included in the latest edition “the first of a new class of Oracle Social CRM Applications that use collective intelligence and analytics help sales professionals qualify leads faster based on buying patterns.”