Oracle refocuses partners around CRM

Oracle Europe Middle East and Africa (EMEA) has introduced its Focused Partner initiative, aimed at giving members of the Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN) a closer relationship with the vendor's CRM On Demand strategy, reports Channel Web.

Partners that join the initiative will have the opportunity to collaborate more closely with the vendor's EMEA CRM On Demand team, product management, sales and local alliances and channels organisation, to help ramp up lead generation activity.

Oracle CRM On Demand partners can be nominated as Focused Partners if they are an OPN member and a member of the CRM On Demand Go-to-Market Initiative or have a compelling, demonstrable integration or implementation experience with CRM On Demand.

Salesforce.com introduced its first product for individuals and very small businesses, offering them the ability to store and manage contacts and accounts online, according to InformationWeek.

The Contact Manager Edition costs $9 per user per month and is available for as few as one or two users.

Features include the ability to store and manage contacts and accounts and track e-mail communications from Microsoft Outlook, Google Gmail and Yahoo Mail.

New Zealand contact centre budgets dropped 7% to $4.3 million in 2009 over 2008, the callcentres.net 2009 New Zealand Contact Centre Industry Benchmarking Report, found, states Reseller News.

The centres plan to spend an average of $423 441 per centre on technology in the next 12 months, a decrease of 19% on 2008, attributed mainly to a reduction of 45% in spending on new technology.

In the next 12 months, the top two technology investment areas for contact centres are replacement or upgrade of customer relationship management and content management systems, the report says.