CRM Reborn: Takeaways from Oracle OpenWorld 2010

Hanging with Larry: 41,000 attendees, plus controversy, corporate rivalry, big presentations, demos of new and not-quite-released software, plus the Black Eyed Peas. No wonder they call it OpenWorld.

Oracle has grown so large that by some new law of physics — yet to be discovered — it needs to compete with every single other technology firm. Yet, Oracle was remarkably “coopertive” about it. SAP had one of the larger booths on the show floor; HP executives presented at keynotes right before Larry Ellison, and most importantly from our perspective, Oracle invited Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff to present his competing vision of cloud computing, in which he directly rebutted Oracle’s own words.

Cutting through all of the debate and posturing, however, OOW also detailed four incredibly important, CRM-related changes currently unfolding:

1. The iPad is the future computing platform for field sales

The iPad was everywhere at OOW. It is no exaggeration to say that 15 minutes into every demo I saw the presenter would say, “let’s see how this would look on an iPad,” and we’d be transferred into a world of multitouch and the highly graphical interface. Notably, Christopher Willis, VP of Marketing at Pyxis — one of Innoveer’s software partners —  told me that 60% of the company’s pipeline is evaluating an iPad solution.

I’ve had a few conversations with customers and prospects in the past 6 months where they were intrigued by the possibility of deploying iPads to their field sales reps, but at OOW everyone suddenly has the same idea — and all of the vendors are rushing to make this happen.

2. Oracle CRM Fusion will be released in Q1 2011

Personally, I feel like I’ve grown old waiting for Oracle Fusion Applications to be released. Got married, had some kids. Still waiting.

Now, Larry Ellison announced that this will be released in Q1 of 2011. Of course he said in 2009 that it would be released in 2010, but who’s keeping track?

With Fusion, however, there’s a lot to be excited about, at least when the product finally gets released. First, it’s supposedly built from the ground up, based on Oracle’s Fusion Middleware, and will feature a quite graphical user interface (hello iPad?). Furthermore, it’s fully integrated with BI. And you can deploy it in your data center, in a private cloud, or Oracle’s public cloud infrastructure. This is quite an important topic for Innoveer and our customers. Stay tuned for a more in-depth blog post on this topic, tracing all of the potential CRM implications.

3. Hardware counts in a cloud computing world

I’m not going to rehash the whole Ellison-Benioff debate here. You can read Denis Pombriant‘s excellent blog posting on that topic. What is important is the idea that Oracle has merged its hardware, software and database products into a monster called the Exalogic Elastic Cloud. While it sounds like a psychedelic rock band from the 1970s, this is a machine so powerful, claims Oracle, that with just two of them, it can “handle all the http requests for Facebook.”

For customers interested in having their own “private cloud” or simply having a higher-performance data center, Exalogic comes bundled with everything you need to run Oracle Fusion Applications, as well as the applications. So think of it as an application appliance for running all of your corporate applications. Even better, according to Oracle, all of the bundled software and hardware is optimized to work together.

This is interesting, to say the least. And to my ears, it sounds like our customers will no longer need to tune their CRM systems to get better performance from the database, nor will they need to even install the software in the first place. Now, it will be interesting to hear more about how the pricing and licensing will work.

4. Next release of CRM On Demand catches up to and partially exceeds Salesforce.com

Lost in all the noise and crowds, the newest version of CRM On Demand was also announced at OOW, and is cleverly called “release 18.” Guess Oracle used all of its naming budget on Exalogic Elastic Cloud.

Nonetheless, the R18 of CRM On Demand arrives with some great new features. I’m especially excited to see that it now integrates Market2Lead, which Oracle acquired in May. Oracle demonstrated the full integrated marketing and sales process, which nicely covered all of the marketing capabilities we’ve been discussing on this blog throughout the year, and in this area, the software leaps ahead of the competition. For comparison, if you want to get this level of marketing functionality with Salesforce.com, you’d need to also implement Eloqua or Aprimo.

CRM On Demand R18 also strengthens the software’s social marketing capabilities, though it’s hard to tell how much is native to the application and how much was being done through Oracle’s partnership with InsideView. If InsideView was Oracle CRM On Demand’s answer to Jigsaw, then Oracle is also gearing up to release its answer to Chatter.  I can’t find the name of this particular offering, but I’m sure I saw Anthony Lye commenting on and “liking” opportunities, and other Facebook-like features in a CRM On Demand environment. (Does anyone have more details to share?)

Bottom Line: Changing CRM as we know it?

Not to get all Anthony Robbins and self-help on you, but at OOW, Benioff referenced Robbins’ observation that “most people overestimate what they can do in a year, and underestimate what they can do in a decade.” And, taking stock of the trends I’ve called out above, and perhaps with the exception of the new CRM On Demand features, the CRM landscape is suddenly evolving in ways that might create quite large changes in the coming years. Indeed, before long, we may be using iPads to access fusion applications running on an Exalogic Elastic Cloud. And it will be beautiful.

But while the blue-sky future of CRM technology looks bright, let’s not forget some of the essential CRM challenges we still face, such as the need to improve lead management for marketing, foster more effective sales management, and learn how to finesse case management techniques to increase first-call resolution in service environments.