Oracle 'same old' strategy for post-Siebel CRM

Oracle has unveiled its strategy to deal with the integration of its Siebel business with the CRM operations of JD Edwards, Oracle and PeopleSoft. The key message is "no change".

The company plans to continue with all its current lines of business for the foreseeable future, with the promise of full integration through its Fusion strategy at some point.

At a conference on Tuesday for customers and press in London, Oracle offered few concrete details on future plans for the four existing customer relationship management businesses other than to insist they would continue as they are under the same financial models and the same software.

But the company did say Oracle-Siebel CRM will form "the centrepiece of the next-generation Oracle Fusion CRM applications strategy".

Oracle also said it had begun the integration of the Oracle E-Business Suite and Oracle's Siebel, PeopleSoft Enterprise and JD Edwards EnterpriseOne CRM products.

Oracle bought the Siebel business nine months ago but said it only "completed the formalities" of the acquisition at the end of May. Oracle claims it is "the market leader in CRM, with five million live end-users and 150 million registered self-service users". But according to analysts at Gartner, this claim does not stack up.

According to Gartner's latest figures, released on Monday, Siebel rival SAP is the market leader in CRM, with 25.6 per cent market share in 2005. In second place is Siebel (17 per cent) and in third, Oracle, including PeopleSoft (6.4 per cent).

Loic le Guisquet, head of Oracle's CRM business in Europe, said he had not seen the latest Gartner figures but he disputed them anyway. "They do those figures on what they are told are sales but they are the most difficult of all in this business," le Guisquet said.

The rising star in the CRM business is Salesforce.com, which according to Gartner's figures, saw its business grow by 77 per cent last year. Oracle, however, saw a loss (-11.7 per cent). The other CRM vendors saw growth of between 6.4 per cent (Siebel) and 22.3 per cent (Amdocs).

According to le Guisquet, Oracle is "basing our on-demand model on the one developed by Siebel". He said: "I strongly believe the dominant model will be the hybrid model [rather than Salesforce's pure-play on-demand strategy]."

This hybrid model allows organisations to opt for on-demand, a standard software-licensing model, or a mixture of both. More and more companies have opted to use licensing at their larger sites and on-demand out in the branches.

At the conference, le Guisquet set out a new model for the future of CRM as seen by Oracle. "CRM has gone through major changes, and we see a big change in the way we use it," he said. "We have gone from a make-and-sell, where we made things and then sold them, to a world of sense-and-respond." Now we are moving toward the "customer-centric enterprise", le Guisquet said.

The company has set a long timetable for the development of Oracle Fusion CRM, which is not expected to arrive before 2008.

Colin Barker writes for ZDNet UK