CRM

In a recent post Gordon Ritter, founder and general partner at Emergence Capital, highlights the state of cloud adoption in industries. along with a few popular cloud vendors for the specific industries.

One of the big news items from Open World in 2013 was the announcement of Cloud Marketplace. Available at https://cloud.oracle.com/marketplace this pretty much is in line with what any software marketplace will do.

CRM has been traditionally important for Oracle and forms a significant part of the apps strategy. But the messaging of CRM was merged into CX in the recent Oracle Open World (2013) with no separate stand on its own.

Whenever we talk about SaaS the terminologies I often hear is: Multitenancy Pay-as-you-go models This looks good - especially if you are comparing to the C++ code that was written to process data files from one format to the other.

You want to order a new cooking gas cylinder (most of us here in India do not have piped gas, bear with me). What would you rather do? Visit your friendly distributor to ask about his health and order the cylinder using that opportunity Talk to a grumpy guy over at the customer service representing the gas company or distributor through phone Order the cylinder through the web site Send a SMS For most of the people like me #4 should be an obvious choice.

We have mostly expected news and somethings unexpected in the recent Gartner Magic Quadrant for CRM (2013). We talk about Sales Force Automation (SFA) here, since that is the most common talked about area.

Oracle is not on the CRM Magazine’s 2013 leader board. I would probably not even notice this, except for the pretty bad patch that Siebel is going through. A few facts that puts this in the perspective though:

Imagine this - you have sat with the users for hours through the requirement gathering sessions. You got your technical team to design some magic to get those requirements in the application.

This happened to me recently. I was out of country for more than a month, and stopped using my phone number local to India. When I did get back to my life at Bangalore, Airtel customer service called me to inquire why my usage of their service has reduced and whether they can help with any issues with the service.

Who does not love playing a game (and better yet, win it)? This element of human psychology can make the more mundane jobs like effective usage of CRM system interesting - at least, that’s what gamification proponents will want us to believe.