Oracle Gives SMB SaaS the Enterprise Touch

By Angela Natividad | Published Nov 12, 2007

At the OpenWorld Conference today, Oracle unveiled its new line of CRM OnDemand applications.

The solutions are positioned as direct competitors to Salesforce.com's hosted enterprise offerings.

For people sick of pseudo-enterprise Web 2.0 offerings with busy functions reminiscent of Twitter and the Facebook news feed, Oracle will lend you comfort. The CRM OnDemand suite is new media but all business, with the fat and frill completely sizzled off.

Even before the unveiling, the tech sphere was impressed with the ambition and solid feel of Oracle's offering. Phil Wainewright at ZDNet beams, “The next time a C-level executive asks you how Web 2.0 affects the enterprise, you’ll be able to point to Oracle’s new CRM OnDemand applications. They are a powerful demonstration of how Web 2.0 can be applied in an enterprise environment.”

Oracle's CRM OnDemand boasts three major components:

A campaign creation and management function. This frees aspects of a campaign for sharing with others — like remote partners or members of the media — without exposing things you'd rather not put out there, like contact information and orders for the campaign.

A sales opportunities predictor, which compiles internal information (such as order notations) with externals, like financial data from Reuters. Look at this as practical application of mashup technologies like Pipes.

A document sharing and rating library. This enables sales people to share the necessary tools of their trade, like presentations and RFPs, with the organizational assistance of tag clouds, data rating and slide- or page-level searchability.

The ultimate aim of the suite is to make what should be viral highly viral, without exposing sensitive enterprise data to lewd gazes.

And despite the reining SMB feel to this new media-rich hosted solutions model, Oracle plans to divorce itself from “SMB SaaS” — a Salesforce cornerstone — and promote a slicker model, “enterprise SaaS.”

Nice to finally see some professional polish in the sector.