Brent's CRM Blog

Blogger Relationship Management - Oracle Steps Up

This past Friday I participated in what I think may have been the first "blogger call" - as opposed to an analyst call - set up in the CRM industry. Anthony Lye, Oracle's senior vice president of CRM, invited a select group of bloggers to discuss a few developments the company is working on. The call was a little late in getting started and lasted about 20 minutes. And I can't write or comment on what was talked about until March 11th when Oracle makes the information public, but it should be of interest to anyone following the space or who is serious about CRM. What I can comment on is the fact that Oracle held the call in the first place. It's a good sign that Oracle gets the importance the industry blogosphere has with respect to holding important, inclusive conversations with CRM enthusiasts, practitioners, users and customers. Even if I had not been invited I'd feel that way. Because it shows Oracle is paying attention to things that their customers and prospects are involved with - using social media to participate in the conversation. It also shows a great respect for the bloggers, but an even greater respect for the CRM community in which their customers (current and future) look for guidance, information, and to be heard.

So I thank Anthony for putting this together and for inviting me to participate. It puts Oracle ahead in terms of BRM, at least in the CRM industry. Hopefully there will be more questions from the bloggers on the next call (thank God Paul Greenberg was at the ready). Don't take it personal Anthony, we're just not used to being treated like real people....

Technorati : blogger relationship management, crm, oracle
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Are Marc Benioff and Larry Ellison Conspiring Against Me?

Earlier this month I turned in my latest article for Inc. magazine's technology site. It's on why I think 2008 will be the year small businesses will fully embrace CRM. I laid out a few reasons why I think this will happen for the REAL small business crowd - 100 employees or fewer.

UPDATE - I forgot to include the link to my Inc.com article, so here it is:

Small Business Should Embrace CRM in 2008

I talk about how Salesforce.com has led the way in making CRM and SaaS available to the masses, creating an unbelievable amount of attention and, along with NetSuite and RightNow, keeping it alive in the dark days of the dot com bust. So now, with a growing number of companies creating great, affordable, accessible, full-functioned CRM services, it really looks like the time for small businesses to take the plunge. And you have to take your hat off to Marc Benioff for being the industry's ring leader.

And I was feeling real good about that prediction until I started hearing these rumors about Oracle potentially buying Salesforce.com. Now this is bad (for me that is) for two main reasons:

1. I had predicted two straight years that Google would buy Salesforce.com
2. If Oracle does end up buying Salesfoce.com, I think that seriously jeopardizes my prediction that 2008 becomes the year small business dives head-first into CRM

The first point is bad (for me that is) because it really would have been cool to have predicted that one. After all I even got that prediction included in CRM magazine, so I really would have been cool. But the second point is the more important one. After all Oracle, as good as a company as it is, is not known for having a strong relationship with the SmB community - meaning companies under 100 employees. And I think Oracle gobbling up Salesforce.com would scare many of the small Salesforce.com customers off. With Salesforce already swimming upstream concentrating more heavily on enterprise deals, you'd have to believe that even more emphasis will be on battling SAP and Microsoft for more enterprise deals. And while there are many other up and coming CRM providers who will gladly step into a void (if any is created) should Salesforce get swallowed up and focus on small customers begins to evaporate, it would slow the pace of adoption dramatically, in my opinion. Uncertainty and doubt will basically dampen much of the enthusiasm in the space.

But my prediction still has a chance because I don't know if this marriage is really going to take place. And many of the folks I've talked to about the rumor seem to think it's just that - a rumor. But in this world anything is possible, except one of my predictions coming true.  Thanks a lot Marc...you too Larry.

Technorati : crm, oracle, salesforce.com, small business
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SaaS, Along With Crime, Doesn't Pay....According to Larry Ellison

Talk about your mixed messages. Thanks to David Powers over at GotVMail for passing this along to me. Apparently Oracle's Larry Ellison doesn't believe that SAP's strategy of going after SMB's with their Business By Design Suite is a good one. He said that the software-as-a-service (SaaS) market and the lower mid-market (whatever that is) sector is not worth going after.

Here's a quote from Ellison taken from a recent conference call with analysts:

"We've looked very closely at it, and we think it's very hard to make money because there is no synergy. To go downmarket you need a new product and new product development teams. You spend a lot of money developing a whole new product for the low end. But you also need an all-new sales force because we don't call on those customers. We don't call on small businesses, and it's very expensive to call on small businesses. It's very expensive to do ERP implementations in small businesses. The cost of sales is high. The cost of implementation is high. There are virtually no synergies in sales, marketing, and product development and support."

Due to it's large and growing presence, Ellison said Oracle is interested in the "small market" (again, whatever that means).But he said, "We just haven't figured out a way to make a substantial profit in that market. We think it's hard to make money."

I give him credit for coming out and saying it. I questioned SAP's devotion to really going after the SMB market over two years ago when they began making overtures to the SMB space for many of the reasons Ellison brings up. And I still do question it if they still define small businesses as those with up to 1000 employees. But I admit I don't know much about this new product and its pricing, so I can definitely be wrong here. I'll have to do some due diligence.

But with all this talk about SaaS not being worth their time it can't make all those Oracle CRM On Demand customers feel that great.

Technorati : crm, oracle, sap