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Oracle On Demand Release 17 Features New Forcasting, Analytics

By Brendan B. Read
Senior Contributing Editor

With the economy beginning to turn around, and firms seeking and retaining customers while still focused on expense management, Oracle has come out with several timely improvements in its latest Oracle (News - Alert) CRM On Demand offering, Oracle CRM On Demand Release 17. The upgrades for this application, whose delivery channel provides flexibility and scalability at a quick return on investment include:

• New forecasting capabilities include flexible fiscal calendars, the ability to perform revenue and product quantity forecasting and real-time information comparisons against current and historical forecasts
• Usability enhancements and a newly redesigned user interface that enables sales teams to resize it to their preference, quickly navigate to relevant information with the new Head-Up Display, better manage lists and customize field labels in Oracle Mobile Sales Assistant
• Automated time-based workflows to manage sales, marketing, service and channels, while enabling accelerated time-to-value and accurate and timely updates
• Automated migration and data loader tools, including Oracle Migration Tool On Demand to migrate customizations from one environment to another and the Oracle Data Loader On Demand to create, update and delete massive data volumes, all of which reduces administration costs
• Extended Partner Relationship Management functionality that facilitates partner success with new support of partner-delegated administration and analytics for deal registration, funding and pipeline
• Additional language support i.e. Brazilian Portuguese and Norwegian, in addition to the 18 currently supported languages and multi-currency capabilities

Oracle has also unveiled the Oracle CRM On Demand Life Sciences Edition, which supports for rapid sales presentations plus simplified sample management and reporting. With the product,   pharmaceutical companies can make every interaction count, reduce costs, increase distribution, and deploy everywhere. The Oracle CRM On Demand Life Sciences Edition offline client is sales representative and customer facing.

“When debating a new CRM system or an upgrade, the core question asked in many organizations today simply comes down to this: 'When will we see the payback?'” said Robert P. Mahowald, vice president, IDC (News - Alert). “While the business value of CRM is undeniable, when it's deployed as a software-as-a-service offering customers see quick value for their investment, and built-in predictability. A hosted CRM service that provides proven sales team productivity, analytics and out-of-the-box, industry-ready applications, will have most users supplying the answer to their own question: 'right now.'”

“Oracle continues to innovate and provide customers with the best value and the most powerful and complete, best-of-breed CRM on demand service,” said Oracle President Charles Phillips. “The new Oracle CRM On Demand Release 17 will help customers gain more actionable insight, increase sales productivity and achieve cost-savings, and showcases how Oracle solves organizations’ essential requirements to advance business opportunities and results.”