Interview: Mark Woollen, Oracle vice president of CRM products

By Stuart Lauchlan, news and analysis editor

For years, SAP and Siebel bickered over which one was the CRM market leader – and over how to measure this. The answer to both those questions inevitably depended on which vendor you listened to and which analyst firm you were paying to give you market advice and commentary.

The debate goes on, but now it’s a war of words between SAP and Oracle, since the latter propelled itself up the applications market league table through its acquisitions of the likes of Siebel and PeopleSoft. The end result of that strategy has been to give Oracle pole position in the wider applications space, but it’s also left it with a product portfolio that contains several seemingly overlapping applications, not least in the CRM space.

“How do we rationalise having these multiple products?” asks Mark Woollen, Oracle’s VP of CRM products rhetorically. “There are four major segments in the CRM market, what the salespeople would call 'buyer characteristics' or the primary needs that drive CRM purchasing. Each of our products is based on meeting the needs in each of those segments.

“The first of these is simple or departmental CRM. Then there’s suite-based CRM, where integration with the back-end ERP software is what is important. Then there are those CRM suites which are about being focused on specific industry segments. Finally, there is the emerging space towards services-based CRM, especially in the financial services space.

“If you want the first option, for example, an on-demand CRM option would work well or if you want to have it on premises we have a streamlined, easy-to-install SMB version in Siebel Professional Edition. In the suite-based segment we see a lot of success with PeopleSoft or Oracle Enterprise Business Suite (EBS). Customers like Dell have gone for EBS CRM for their call centres because it offers exceedingly tight out-of-the-box integration with their supply-chain.

"For the third category, we have best-of-breed with Siebel industry-specific applications while in the services-space we have been extending each of our existing applications to address the needs of component-based, service oriented architectures that are based around customer processes.”

Full-on on-demand

Oracle has been one of the foremost proponents of the on-demand model of computing, although it can be argued that this vision – formulated in the 1990s by CEO Larry Ellison – has not been articulated in a consistent or particularly compelling manner over the years. As such, the likes of Salesforce.com and NetSuite have come along to steal the on-demand thunder.

“Actually we have a number of offerings in the on-demand space,” insists Woollen. “You need to be very clear about what distinguishes them from one another and from the rest of the market. If you look at the narrower, more confined definition put out by NetSuite and Salesforce.com, these are multi-tenant applications delivered on-demand. We have that in Siebel CRM On Demand, which we have moved over to the Oracle hosting facilities.

“Then we have Oracle On Demand, which is a whole separate discussion. This is full-on on-demand hosting which is closer to outsourcing in some respects, although there are examples among customers that go beyond traditional outsourcing definitions. Ingersol Rand is a good example in that they use Siebel CRM on the front-end and Oracle EBS on the back-end.

"They have some stuff that they want to run on premises, but they also want to use on-demand to take the functionality to other parts of the company where they can’t deliver on-premises or to third parties where they want to have a common interface. Their customers can’t access on premises applications so they want to have an on demand option for them. We provide the integration between the two environments with seamless integration.”

Fair enough, but given that it’s a company that doesn’t deal in settling for second place, can Oracle wrestle the on demand crown from the enfants terrible like Salesforce.com? “It’s important to look at the segmentation of where the on-demand phenomenon is occurring most strongly,” reckons Woolen. “The small to medium-sized segment might be a tipping point. If you look at enterprise-level deployments, it’s one thing to be able to do transactions involving 25,000 users, but quite another to have 60,000 and not just in departmental implementations."

The F-word

“Gartner Group talks about the gap that the on-demand phenomenon will have to overcome to get to that tipping point. This will involve the end-to-end integration of business processes. Companies have successfully survived the downturn of the early part of the decade. The last two or three years has been about how we can take old systems and use them to acquire new customers.

“If they have CRM systems, they often have stovepiped functionality, and as a result they have a very fractured customer experience from one channel to another such as between the web and the call centre. The challenge is how to provide integrated end-to-end reusable processes.”

Woollen cites US firm Home Depot as a prime example of a company that is starting to do this in practice. “They can now provide a consistent customer experience via integrated end-to-end processes,” he explains. “They have put in place the ability for a customer to walk into a Home Depot branch to shop for a carpet, pick up a sample and arranged for someone to come to their home to measure the precise configuration.

"But then the customers find that they can’t be at home when the guy is supposed to come around, so they can go online and work with all the third party systems to make the necessary changes to the arrangements. When someone comes out to measure the floors and sends back the information, the Home Depot store can then follow this up. It’s all a very seamless experience for the customer. Every time they talk a new party in the processes, the Home Deport makes the experience consistent.”

Talking of consistency, it’s only so long that any conversation about applications with Oracle can go without mention of the F-word – Fusion. Fusion is of course the grand plan to integrate the diverse code bases of the products that have accumulated in Oracle’s portfolio.

“We’re getting through the requirements phase right now and have been working with the engineering teams,” says Woollen. “We are moving forward pretty well and taking a very measured approach. We’re still looking at a 2008 timeframe for version one products. There will be a Fusion version 1. If you look at what will be version 1 of Fusion CRM, it will have basic functionality. We will invest in new versions and see what we can learn from our industry specific work.

“The underlying technology for Fusion is the technology that we’re using today. We’re also focusing on taking a look at all the products that we have acquired and asking what the business processes are that are most important to customers. We’ve already delivered a couple of these in the form of hosted telephony on demand and we’re working on other processes, such as opportunities to cash.“

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