Oracle Corp has turned the sales automation market upside down with free enterprise sales applications. Oracle has launched OracleSalesOnline.com, an online application that delivers the core sales applications of the Oracle E-Business Suite 11i free online.
"OracleSalesOnline.com has changed the sales force automation market by offering basic sales force automation services (SFA) services for free," says Hein Pretorius, CRM product manager at Oracle SA. Traditionally he points out the same enterprise-level product has been delivered on a CD.
"With this week`s announcement, Oracle is making it easier for companies to begin leveraging the Oracle E-Business Suite. Oracle is able to use the strength of its Internet architecture as the basis for delivering this and other applications from the Oracle E-Business Suite as an online service."
Pretorius explains that core functionality in OracleSalesOnline.com, such as customer and opportunity management and scheduling, will be free. Ultimately Oracle plans to provide more advanced services, such as, compensation, global sales forecasting, expense and travel management as a pay-as-you-go service.
"This new model will appeal to all companies wanting to avoid price, maintenance and implementation barriers to core sales force automation applications."
By accessing Oracle`s sales automation applications via the online service model companies can rapidly deploy enterprise-class sales force automation capabilities, enabling sales organisations of any size to easily and actively manage the sales process, Pretorius continues. Traditionally, he says, companies have taken on expensive and time-consuming implementations to receive the benefits of enterprise applications.
With OracleSalesOnline.com, sales professionals can have personalised access to sales tools, such as income planning and forecasting, and can share information, updates, leads and follow-up activity with other users in their organisations. "Furthermore, companies can throw away current client-server systems, which are expensive to maintain," Pretorius states.
He advises that OracleSalesOnline.com is the first in a series of applications from the Oracle E-Business Suite that Oracle intends to bring online as a service. Additional applications are scheduled to be announced in the coming months.
"Companies currently looking to invest significantly in a sales automation implementation should consider OracleSalesOnline.com. They can get enterprise strength sales capabilities for free, with no hardware or implementation costs. The days of spending thousands of rands for sales software are over."
Pretorius adds that more than 400 companies in at least 15 countries are actively managing their sales activities with OracleSalesOnline.com.
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