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Oracle Combines Social Networking and CRM

IBM is not the only ECM vendor looking to leverage social networking capabilities in their applications. Looks like Oracle is getting into the game as well. In this case, it’s a mix of CRM and social networking in an On Demand solution.

Sounds a little like salesforce.com’s new Spring 08 release to me.

Oracle believes they are on the leading edge of SaaS CRM solutions and they may well be. The amount of discussion happening around Enterprise 2.0 (or Web 2.0 in the enterprise) is dizzying and trying to filter out the fact of what’s truly possible from what’s visionary is difficult.

Oracles CRM OnDemand 15 features social networking capabilities such as:

• Sticky Notes: Users can mark any object with a sticky note comment and subscribe to the message stream to follow that object. Sticky Note “conversations” can be exposed as a gadget or portlet in iGoogle or MyYahoo!.
• Message Center: This is functionality to co-ordinate all the activity around sticky notes and their resulting conversations.

To incorporate this type of functionality in its CRM solution, Oracle has enabled Web 2.0 capabilities like RSS and widget APIs. And of course they have subscribed to the OpenSocial club.

So Oracle is integrate social networking into CRM, salesforce.com is integrating content management which has a social networking flavor and IBM is selling social networking technologies and offering a new service that helps implement social networking in an enterprise.

Remember Hinchcliffe’s predictions for Enterprise 2.0 in 2008? Here’s a couple:

• “With more and more implementations of Web 2.0 apps, SaaS and mashups in the enterprise we’ll see two big requirements that need to be looked after: security and infrastructure governance.”
• “The software giants will reign supreme over vendors selling Web 2.0 versions of traditional enterprise apps. But the market is still there for SMB’s.”

Well the software giants are certainly doing their best to keep their markets. Obviously implementing and/or incorporating Enterprise 2.0 functionality is seen to be key to that.

If it’s salesforce.com that interests you, read about their latest release or have a look at IBMs newest social networking plans.

You can learn more about Oracle’s CRM OnDemand solution on their site.