On June 6 Larry Ellison and Mark Hurd announced details surrounding the Oracle Public Cloud offering, highlighting Oracle’s incorporation of the cloud as integral to the Fusion Applications strategy. The announcement was delivered in vintage Ellison, irritating some who don’t like his showmanship. Much of the content was focused on the technical aspects of the Oracle Public Cloud: is single tenancy better than multi-tenancy; the value of industry standards; and the virtues of virtualization. There were also announcements of various acquisitions which will support Oracle’s social media capabilities.
Social Media
Enterprise Social Media is a very trendy area today; “Social Media” may even be too large and ambiguous a subject area to capture its diverse parts. Doug Henschen comments that Oracle is reacting late to Social Networking, which has some validity; however, Oracle’s social networking vision is an advance from what’s currently available from other vendors. Focusing on apps that support internal collaboration, today there are enterprise social networking tools that are tightly integrated with business applications & associated processes (Chatter), and ones that span the enterprise (Jive), but none that really plug into all of your primary enterprise applications (easily). Taking a quote that puts things succinctly from Mark Hurd’s recent InfoWeek article:
“Because businesses are run by: I’ve got a strategy. I then support that strategy with a business model. I then support that business model with processes. I then automate those processes with applications.”
For enterprise social networking to be effective it must enable communication and collaboration across processes, across applications; and have capabilities that support those interactions. Oracle Social Network promises a social networking platform that is tightly integrated with Fusion applications, and contains capabilities that are more than hash tags, posts, updates, likes, etc. (think of a Facebook/Google Wave mash-up fed by all your enterprise data). This will allow for easier incorporation into cross departmental/cross process collaboration. An enterprise social networking platform that is tightly integrated across processes and applications may encourage emergent business processes that break down organizational silos.
Oracle also highlighted their investments in customer facing social media applications, with the acquisition of Vitrue and Collective Intellect. These applications I will discuss in a subsequent post.
Multi Vs. Single Tenant
There’s been a lot of buzz about Oracle’s decision to leverage a virtualized single tenant model for their cloud, vs. a multi-tenant model. From what I know, Oracle architected Fusion Applications from the ground up to able to be delivered in a multi-tenant environment, but made a deliberate decision to deploy them single tenant. The benefits of multi-tenant are well known, including hardware economy, elasticity, effort to upgrade, and rapidity of feature releases. Multi-tenant limitations include potential concerns around security, API data allotment limitations, and some lack of control around upgrade cycles. In general the benefits outweigh the limitations. At the end of the day, customers purchase a cloud application because of the experience they get; including a rapid and relatively simple implementation (compared to on premise applications), reliability, usability, continuous innovation, and reduced cost of ongoing maintenance. The multi-tenant orthodoxy believes that their architecture is essential to delivering this customer experience. Oracle disagrees. In our limited experience so far as a customer of Fusion CRM since V1, Oracle is right. We’ve seen 2 major releases delivered on schedule, containing everything promised and more; and the offering is price competitive.
One major difference between Oracle and other cloud offerings lies in Oracle’s ownership of the entire stack. Oracle owns the data center, the hardware, the application servers, the middleware, the database, the application software; almost everything needed for a cloud application. This is unique amongst cloud app vendors, and may give Oracle an advantage. It may give Oracle the ability to deliver elasticity, easy upgrades, and continuous innovation; with robust security and control over upgrades, and without concerns around allotments—all on a single tenant architecture. Contrary to what many pundits are saying, I don’t believe Oracle made an about face to Single Tenant. Oracle clearly believes that their architecture is the optimal one. As Fusion Applications grow in adoption, time will tell who is right.
Oracle’s Cloud Strategy
Oracle’s cloud strategy strategy today includes offering a comprehensive suite of applications, a cloud database, cloud Java platform. The problem Oracle is setting out to solve is a reduction in the amount of disparate applications to manage, integration amongst applications, and the multitude of challenges such a scenario engenders. Salesforce.com and Workday are both great applications; but they exist in isolation, and it’s up to the owners of those applications to figure out how to make them work together. Intelenex deals with many customers with an Oracle ERP back-end who have struggled to figure out how to make their quoting, RMA, trade, and other processes integrate between Salesforce.com and Oracle EBS. There is tremendous business value in solving these problems for customers with a pre-integrated, best of breed application suite.
Nothing to this scale has ever been done before in enterprise software. Discussion of Oracle’s strategy is warranted and valuable for customers to make informed purchase decisions. For those that are distracted by Larry Ellison’s presentation style, there should be no confusion about his understanding of the cloud. Let’s not forget that he was an early and significant investor in both Salesforce.com and NetSuite. Oracle’s preliminary offering can be reviewed at cloud.oracle.com.
As Intelenex is in the business of implementing CRM systems, one would think that the question of why to use our services would be easy to answer. This question has only been asked rarely, and partly because of the question’s infrequency, and in part because the answer seemed evident, I haven’t been prepared with an articulate response. So why should a company choose to hire an implementation firm instead of deploying CRM themselves?
First, a little background. Until the advent of Software as a Service CRM—products like Oracle CRM on Demand and Salesforce.com—almost all CRM deployments were conducted either by a large internal IT staff, or an external consulting firm, as deployments were typically large and complex. The first SaaS applications targeted smaller businesses, and came with a new message from software vendors: “CRM deployments can be fast, easy, and done in weeks not months, through intuitive point and click interfaces, and done by yourself.” This message was designed to contrast with the reputation of existing CRM systems, whose complexity and failure rate were high. And since the early SaaS applications were slim on features, there was less complexity possible for a deployment, and fewer ways for customers to get themselves in trouble. Fast forward to today: SaaS CRM is state of the art, in some areas best of breed, and can run the sophisticated operations of large corporations. Yet the messaging hasn’t evolved in pace with the Software. While the applications are easier than ever to configure and deploy, successful CRM deployments depend on much more than just easy configurability of the application.
Which brings us to the first reason to support a rollout with external consultants: Methodology. Most organizations don’t have a strong internal competency responsible for deploying software without the assistance of third parties. While the technology itself is no longer mystifying to business users, the program management and governance required to plan, design, and sustain an application for the long term is a skill that most sales, marketing and service managers (typical purchasers of SaaS CRM) lack. Many IT organizations—where these skills typically reside—are resource strapped, and unavailable for new projects, making them less able to take the entirety of an application deployment.
Experience is another key area. A consulting firm should have experience with a number of different business types, and have come up with many creative solutions in the past. They should appreciate a challenge, and offer ways of thinking outside, on top of or under the box. Great consultants provide an external perspective, and can offer a reality check when one is needed. Another area is experience with the application itself. To me there is an apt analogy between these applications and video games I grew up with, IE Super Mario Brothers. While they may be easy for the novice to start with, it takes an experienced player to know where the Secret Underwater Level is.
Likewise with a SaaS CRM application, there are always bugs, shortcuts, and idiosyncrasies. The consultant should understand where the product has come from, what its release cycle has been, and what new features are likely to come soon. The more experience one has with the application, the better functional recommendations one can make, the faster the configuration will go, and the more elegant the design will be.
Simple to Use-Not Easy to Replicate
And good design is the ultimate reason to use a consulting firm. I’ve never had a client say “Can you make the CRM system really complicated to use”? Everyone always wants simple, and we hear the phrase “out of the box” quite often. Simplicity is the child of great design. It can take a great deal of inventiveness to reduce a process from 5 clicks to 2, which may dramatically affect user adoption. Great CRM consulting firms love what they do, and are constantly living and breathing CRM ideas. They should be able to bring a depth of thought to your project that you would be unlikely to match on your own.
The ultimate answer comes down to business value. A strong consulting firm should accelerate the time to productivity, keep the business focused on their core competencies, improve user adoption of the application, and leave a stronger internal capability for the experience. It will inevitably cost money for the CRM application to be deployed, even if internally. It may be in terms of time for internal employees; in the repercussions of project delays; in less than optimal user adoption; or in a lack of training on application features. Bringing in a strong consulting firm to help deploy your CRM system should result in the faster attainment of the goals you set for your company when you determined to deploy CRM.
