Larry Ellison at Dreamforce?

This is completely speculation on my part but I was wondering if Larry Ellison has any intention of speaking at Dreamforce the same way that Marc Benioff spoke at Oracle Open World.  Might be fun but keep in mind that this speculation.  If you have any information I would love to hear it.

The Black Swan

I just finished reading “The Black Swan”, a book that has been on my list since it came out in 2007 and I highly recommend it, though it is not easy reading.  There is a great deal of set up before you get to the whole point of the book in the last 50 pages.

“The Black Swan” is about uncertainty in the real world and the subtitle explains it all: “The Impact of the Highly Improbable” and it is something that I can see affecting CRM and its users on many levels.  Highly improbable things happen frequently and they have deep and unpredictable impacts on our world.

Uncertainty is related to risk and randomness, and while we lay people might lump all of them into the same definition, they are different.  My understanding of the three is that risk is something to which you can attach a probability like a coin toss landing heads (50/50 or .5).  Randomness is less constrained than risk if only because it is too complex to compute — if we flip one hundred coins we might reasonably expect half of them to land heads but we can’t say which ones.  Uncertainty is a condition or event that will surprise us, one that is not on the radar.  A blue bird, sometimes called an unknown unknown.

The blue bird interests me most and is an important factor for CRM.  I have been trying to get my head around some data that I collected earlier this year about sales and forecasting that seems to relate to this.  As you might recall, the data showed that the vast majority of sales forecasts (better than 90% of them) are worthless.  They are so inaccurate that they can make a coin toss look like the model of precision.

My question: Is this the best we can expect or are there things we might do to improve our forecasts by reducing uncertainty?

The data also show that most sales managers engage in a process of downloading forecasts to spreadsheets in which they massage the data with the intention of improving it.  If the dismal forecasting results are the product of an improvement process, it can only suggest that the starting point data is no better (remember GIGO).

All this evidence notwithstanding companies continue to make money more often than not and sales people manage to sell things.  And according to Jim Dickey and Barry Trailer nearly sixty percent of them make quota.  How can this be?  How can we be so profoundly bad at sales forecasting and still manage to sell things?

First, though there is a great deal of uncertainty in sales forecasting, uncertainty is a two-way street.  Deals come in that were not forecasted or perhaps not even known about — so-called blue birds — and some deals that appear to be a lock simply evaporate.  Anyone who has tried to sell — and forecast — knows this.

Customers do rational things for emotional reasons, the saying goes and the irony to me is that at precisely the moment when we need the customer to act emotionally — to buy a product — we expect that customer to act rationally.  If you doubt this then how can you explain attaching a probability to an otherwise emotional decision.  It’s not wise to do that so if you are going to forecast using a probability of close, then you have to assume a set of rational expectations.  In other words, if we have been through a sales process with the customer — understood the business problem demonstrated how our solution solves the problem and asked for the order — we expect the logical conclusion, a purchase order.

But while the situation might look certain or at least logical to us, we have little or no visibility into the similar process being conducted by our competitors and there lies a great source of uncertainty.

What can be done?

As mentioned above with GIGO, we need to acknowledge that the way we are forecasting is not working; in other words, stop digging the hole we have gotten into.  There’s too much uncertainty in a forecast to believe the numbers we generate.

But stopping the excavation will not solve the problem; it will simply prevent the hole from getting deeper.  As sales people we can try to eliminate some of the uncertainty in our deals but by definition, we can’t do that.  We don’t know what we don’t know.  Even if we know everything our competition says and does we have no visibility into whether the stock market will crater the day before we expect the P.O.  There is always something.

Nonetheless, a company’s sales usually fluctuate around a level that is near to the level of the goal — few sales teams in aggregate hit the ball out of the park and few get shut out.  Uncertainty makes sales a numbers game meaning the more irons you have in the fire the more opportunities you have and the better insulated you are against risk.  Notice I said risk and not uncertainty.  More opportunities reduce the importance of a single opportunity because there are many ways to make your number, that’s risk.  But there is nothing that will insulate your forecast from the remote (we hope) possibility of the stock market cratering or flu breaking out in your customer’s headquarters.

If sales really is a numbers game then it makes sense to have systems that can help you manage big numbers of everything — opportunities, deals you know.  More important, it is also essential that we have ways to get as many good opportunities into a pipeline as possible.

For years, we’ve had a discussion about the efficacy of SFA — is it good, is it worth the effort, isn’t it just a management tool?  Ironically, there are still companies out there that believe they are too small for SFA or that it doesn’t work.  In a few years it will be the same stories with social CRM and by then the companies that failed to adopt SFA will be completely out of business.

Truth is, we need both these days.  We need SFA to manage our large data sets and we need social CRM to help us take uncertainty out of deals.  If we never use an outbound social CRM tool such as a blog or micro-blog or networking site we would be fine as long as we had some exposure to tools that help us know what customers think in aggregate.  For me that’s where the power of social CRM is, it’s in helping us reduce uncertainty by that radical idea of asking customers what they think.

Customer experience or service product?

There is a difference between a customer experience and a service product and it is worth noting the distinction.  We seem to obsess about the former and almost ignore the latter and that’s too bad because I think there is money to be made in the difference.

The distinction reminds me of the big discussion that went on a few decades ago over quality.  At the time imports from around the world, but principally Japan and Europe, were cleaning our clocks because they were perceived to be of higher quality than domestic brands.

In typical American fashion we mounted a comeback strategy to bring our quality up to world standards and for a while smart business discussions were all about quality.  It reminds me of the last few years and the relentless emphasis we have placed on the customer experience.  Let me say that emphasizing anything as fundamental as this can’t be bad, in moderation, but there’s more to consider.

My interest in the customer experience was provoked by a long series of calls between my wife and our mortgage company, a typical big bank.  The problem was that the bank had failed to pay our property taxes though it was clearly their responsibility because they collect the money each month and hold it in escrow.  The problem got worse as we waded into it.  Not only did the bank not pay our tax bill but also they had inadvertently paid someone else’s with our money.

My wife had a series of calls with bank representatives who work in the call center.  Each bank agent promised to fix the problem, each tried to reassure us and each was pleasant and professional told my wife to have a nice day at the end of the call.  My wife ended each call thinking that the agents were “nice” and that the problem had been solved.  Unfortunately, there was no follow up and here I will let you imagine the rest.  After four “nice” conversations the problem is still there.

Now if this was a manufacturing problem I would say that the product is broken and that the bank has a quality problem.  The typical response when quality became an important value in manufacturing was to improve final inspections and it worked.  Certainly a lot of inferior product was kept from the customer but the manufacturer also ended up with a lot of products that needed fixing.  Clearly something else had to be done and that led to the idea of designing quality in rather than inspecting for it.

I think our focus on customer experience is a lot like focusing on quality.  Just as you can’t separate quality from the whole manufacturing process you can’t separate the customer experience from offering a high quality service product.  My wife is more tolerant than I am and left each encounter (so far) encouraged that the situation would be rectified.

Intense focus on the customer experience has left us with a hollowed out service product, at least in this case but I will extrapolate here.  It appears to me that the bank might be incenting people to be nice but also to pass the ball and not care too much if the ball falls on the ground and dribbles away.

This experience vividly shows me and I hope others that there are two parts to customer service — the customer experience for sure, but also delivering a quality service that goes well beyond being nice or professional or any other qualifier that to attribute to the people involved except one.  You still have to get the job done, and CRM needs to ensure that aspect as much as it addresses the experience.

Rock bottom?

We are all junkies for leading economic indicators.  Whether it’s the first spring swallow or an uptick in orders for semi-conductor fabrication gear, we love to call the start of a new movement, if only because it signals the end of something more prosaic.

So it is now at what appears to be the end of a bad recession and the beginning of a new economic cycle.  The aforementioned semi-conductor sector has done its thing along with house prices and general real estate activity is picking up.

But what about the trailing indicators — those things that take their time going down when the economy hits the skids?  A notorious lagging indicator is always employment.  Companies cut jobs as a last resort in the early stages of a downturn and cautiously re-hire after the first indicators of recovery are in full bloom.

Newspapers and TV talking heads meanwhile wring their hands about a “jobless recovery” as if the economy is spring loaded and able to bounce back with the seeming alacrity and speed of a toy.  They are always surprised at employment latency and the headlines hardly vary from recovery to recovery.

I have my own economic indicator that I watch with guarded optimism at this time of a recovery and fright when the economy seems to be going south.  It is marketing spending and a corollary is the number of people I know in marketing who are out of work and having difficulty finding it.

In late 2007 I began hearing whispers of a housing bubble getting ready to burst and through early 2008 the whispers turned to shouts but marketing spending seemed to be on pace.  Later analysis showed that the recession actually began around the same time as the whispers but marketing spending was resilient.  I recall having lunch with an already out of work CMO in May 2008 and we were musing about the arc of the economy that year.

“Do you think things will pick up in the second half (of 2008)?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” I said not wanting to deflate him.  “I think we’ll see when we know about marketing spending after July first.”

My idea, which I explained to him, was that the marketing money being spent at that point was loaded into budgets that had a more or less calendar year cycle.  The real test, coming after July first, would be whether companies with June 30 year ends would be as bullish or with six months more perspective, they might pull in their horns.  The distinction is important for our industry because so many companies in the technology sector have June 30 year-ends, thus their marketing spending renews on July first.

At the time, my reading of the tea leaves advised caution because I had not seen the typical run up to a new spending year in the second quarter of 2008.  In other words, fewer companies were asking for quotations, planning programs and the like.  I was right.  The second half of 2008 was slower than the first half and a lack-luster summer gave way to a wild autumn ride on Wall Street that erased doubts about the economy’s direction as well as untold fortunes and more than a few marketing jobs in the technology sector.

The first indicators of renewal have, indeed, been spotted both economy-wide and in the tech sector.  I know of at least one out of work mid-level marketing person who got a job offer last week and several senior people now consulting so there’s that (highly unscientific, I know).  But I still have not seen a general if cautious uptick in marketing spending plans.  This would be the quarter for that to happen if companies are intent on starting the new year with any momentum.

Marketing costs money even in today’s highly automated and socialized marketing world.  There is still time to make plans for early next year even if they get delayed and the first harbingers of revival lead me to think that we are about to see the first tentative steps.  Those chip makers and house builders can’t all be wrong.

Adobe on a roll (hold the fries)

For the second day in a row Adobe made an important partnering announcement.  Yesterday the company said it had teamed with Salesforce.com to produce Adobe Flash Builder for Force.com, which will speed development of Flash-based user interfaces for Salesforce customers.  Today Adobe announced that it has concluded acquisition of Omniture, a web analytics vendor based in Orem, Utah for a whopping $1.8 billion.

It seems an obvious strategy to leverage some of Abobe’s ingredient technologies, like Flash, to make a bigger presence for itself in Cloud Computing.  The addition of web analytics is very interesting.

At this point in the evolution of CRM, if you are not already a big player the chances of starting from scratch and getting big are nugatory so the strategy has to be to buy.  But Adobe’s choice of partnering with a leading CRM company for user interface design and following up with buying analytics is intriguing.  With these two ingredient technologies, Adobe appears to be 1) betting on the future importance of understanding customer moves and motivations and 2) clearly understanding that robust simplicity must rule all software interfaces regardless of platform.

If you ask me, these are two good bets.  While there are clearly many good analytics products on the market either freestanding or embedded in business applications, my research tells me that regular users are still too confused about analytics to fully leverage them.  Ask ten people in our industry the difference between reporting and analytics and you will see what I mean.

My quibble with analytics and analytics vendors generally is that few acknowledge the effort required to capture good data.  Too often the MO is to capture large samples and get some averages, a good but not great approach that, in another setting, once left a bemused Benjamin Disraeli to list three categories of lies, “Lies, damn lies and statistics”.  There’s no substitute for understanding demographics, biases, attitudes and the like to better predict behavior.  Here’s hoping that Adobe gets it and uses Omniture to go the more rigorous route.

Fusion applications decide an argument, sort of

With Oracle’s announcement of Fusion applications, you can make a reasonable case that Salesforce.com has won an important ten-year old argument about the future of the software industry.  Notwithstanding SAP, the only significant outlier left, Oracle is the last major software company to adopt on-demand computing as a centerpiece thus awarding legitimacy and critical mass once and for all to the idea.

Amen.

But the Oracle announcement says more about business models than technology paradigms and at the model level it is not clear that Salesforce has won.  Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff’s vision of business applications delivered over the internet has won an important victory but the business model — subscription services — that makes this technology the center of the movement and exclusive delivery mechanism has not eliminated all competition.  Not yet, at any rate.

The reasons are simple enough, market reticence generated by concerns — both real and imaginary — about security or the viability of the technology model still hamper full adoption of the business model.  As a result, companies as diverse as Oracle, Microsoft and Sage have hedged their bets by offering technology that can be implemented in numerous ways including on-demand as well as by conventional deployments.  As a result vendors have effectively thrown the business model decision over the wall to the customer.

With software capable of, shall we say, polymorphous deployment, the ultimate decision about how to deploy now becomes the exclusive province of the customer as the vendors have now turned into Solomon or, in a modern interpretation, Burger King.  Customers are completely free to have it their way or ways.  They can deploy business applications in a fully SaaS configuration or in hybrid ways that are to a lesser extent owned and operated by the IT department.  As I have noted before, this is typical transition state behavior of vendors straddling two diverse paradigms.

It is no surprise that adoption of the business model lags adoption of the technology.  It has always been true that conversion from traditional software licensing to SaaS is a big step and one that for many software companies could lead to financial ruin if not handled expertly.  More to the point, there are customers who, for reasons of security, custom and preference believe that SaaS computing is not for them, at least not now.

So it is no surprise therefore that the most successful SaaS companies are those that, like Salesforce, grew organically from on-demand roots.  Other successful SaaS companies like Oracle bought their way into SaaS computing, a time honored tradition when adopting new models.

Even before Oracle’s Fusion announcement at Open World this month, the company had been a player in SaaS based CRM with Oracle CRM On-Demand due to its earlier acquisition of Siebel Systems.  But it remains to be seen if any software vendor can fully realize the benefits of SaaS — and now Cloud Computing without full emersion into the technology model.

One of the most powerful aspects of SaaS computing is not the idea of subscriptions or even Internet delivery but of a single version of the applications supporting all users.  With a single version of the code, all users have the same foundation on which to configure, modify and build new applications.  The single code set — also called multi-tenant architecture — makes it hugely unlikely that any two independent software makers would develop incompatible applications and therein lays the power of the business model.

This single idea makes it highly likely that applications built to the standards of the foundation — or platform as we like to call it — will be able to inter-operate.  Take this standard away and you have the same Babel of competing standards and proprietary designs that have been the bain of the software industry.  There is a cost associated with this lack of standardization and software customers have been paying it for decades — with rising resentment.

That cost is not measured strictly monetarily; there is opportunity cost involved too.  When everyone played by the same conventional software rules the opportunity cost problem was equivalent to a farmer experiencing bad weather.  But SaaS computing eliminates the weather variable giving a big advantage to companies under its umbrella.  So it is ironic that the decision about adoption is still left to taste.

With most of the hybrid products, the same code can be deployed in a conventional multi-tenant way or as a standalone system behind a traditional firewall.  The segregated system becomes a unique instance the moment a developer modifies the platform.  Doing that makes the idea of standards a waste of time.

But for the time being — and I am still calling it a transition state — we can expect to see a lot of deployments in which the software is SaaS ready but the deployment is decidedly twentieth century.  In the next five to ten years we will see examples of companies trying to back out of their proprietary SaaS-like systems to finally get on board with SaaS or Cloud Computing.  It will all have been avoidable and it will be good business for software consultants.

As Kurt would say, “So it goes.”

Economics of sales forecasting

I have been studying sales forecasting and forecasting tools a lot recently and I have come to the conclusion that we need better tools as well as better ways of using them.

There is a lot that can be said about forecasting, its current state and how to improve it and I don’t want to leave anything out but I will try to be brief.  First off, how we forecast says a lot about our views on economics.  Given that most of us are not economists, our views of economy are most likely derived from what we see and hear on a daily basis, much like our view of the weather.

For over thirty years our view of economics has been increasingly colored by the ascendant views of the New- or Neo-Classical school of economics.  To over simplify, it is a view that goes back to Adam Smith, of supply and demand and a belief that economics is a hard science governed by equations as rigorous as Newtonian physics — wishful thinking I’m afraid.

The most germane idea for our purposes is Say’s Law.  Say was a French economist, very much in the Classical school who said that “production creates its own demand” and from that we derive the famous supply side economics of the last thirty years.  Supply side economics corresponded nicely with another phenomenon in our world, the introduction of the CPU chip in 1968 and the cascade of new products that ensued over the coming forty years, roughly the high-tech era.

Increasing CPU power followed Gordon Moore’s famous dictum, now Moore’s Law, of increasing CPU power and decreasing cost, and it created a special circumstance that governed supply and demand for technology goods.  Moore’s Law made Say’s Law work like a charm.  A corollary to Say is that all markets clear, i.e. all supply is eventually absorbed at some price — but maybe not a premium price.

Moore’s Law ensured that a fresh supply of technology goods that superseded the earlier generation would arrive and drive demand thus ensuring Say’s Law would operate as advertised.  But if Say’s Law requires something like Moore’s Law to operate smoothly, then it must be said that Say’s Law is a special case, not an iron clad law of economics.

What’s that got to do with sales forecasting?  Quite a bit.  In the special case of selling into a market with undiminished demand, sales forecasting need not be a lot more complicated than determining where we are in the sales cycle.  If we’re ninety percent through the cycle we ask for the order and there is a reasonable chance that we will get the business — no guarantee, but a reasonable chance.

It hardly matters that our ninety percent is not really a probability derived statistically but really just a milestone in a process.  In an expanding market there are enough deals percolating that reasonably diligent effort will result in on-quota performance.  But on-quota performance is not what it once was and forecasting is in disrepute in many places.

According to Jim Dickey and Barry Trailer at CSO Insights, only about fifty-eight percent of sales people manage to make or exceed quota.  Also, according to my research less than ten percent of sales forecasts have an accuracy of ninety percent; the rest aren’t worth the time and effort it takes to compile them.

What’s happening to sales forecasting is not surprising.  With Moore’s Law slowing down and with so many formerly new market niches filled with products, we are transitioning from an era of expanding markets to one of zero-sum conditions.  In a zero-sum situation, if you are going to win business you need to do it by displacing another product.  If you are a customer in a displacement game it is always easy to do nothing and wait for a better offer and continue using an existing product that might not have all the bells and whistles you want but fills the need nevertheless.

A zero-sum economic environment has a lot of uncertainty in it.  You might use the words uncertainty and risk interchangeably but they are not the same.  Risk is something that is unknown but knowable.  If a deal forecast is at risk a sales representative — frequently at the urging of the sales manager — can ask more questions, get more data, and piece together an answer.  There are many issues in sales that are simply unknowable or mostly unknowable, for example, the details of the bid your competition makes.

When uncertainty — not just risk — enters the picture, our forecasting paradigm that relies on milestones in the sales process becomes useless.  We need better tools if we are to forecast in the face of uncertainty and those tools exist but few of us have taken them up yet.  For example, prudent managers might start with the territory planning process.  How much white space is in the territory?  What percentage of that white space is likely to churn this year?  What is the overall economic forecast?  Given our market share what is the probable share of that white space that we can capture?  Is that enough to sustain quota for one or more people?  How should we incentivize them?

Sales forecasting will always be an inexact science but we can do better than we are currently.  We could persist in basing our forecasting ideas on Say’s Law but inevitably it is a race to the bottom, to pure competition on price.  The airlines do that but none of them makes any money.

Oracle Fusion in (financial) Context

With the introduction of Fusion applications Oracle has joined the cloud community.  You might want to argue that the company has been involved in the cloud for many years as one of the key technology underpinnings of many of the biggest SaaS companies.  That was one of Larry Ellison’s big points at the Churchill Club.  Cloud computing still needs a ground station to serve it and Oracle has been at the top of that market for a long time.  For example, salesforce.com uses the Oracle database to support its service and many other companies do too.

Because so many software company founders and executives got their starts at Oracle it was a natural for them to build on what they knew and they knew Oracle.  That may not sound like much if you stop thinking about it at the database but the community of Oracle people present and past gave many a start-up the intangible resources they needed to be successful.  Knowing who a product manager is or what is generally on a product roadmap can be useful information.  I am not saying that any legal lines are ever crossed but having been an insider and understanding the culture as well as the technology can be very helpful.

At any rate Oracle is, or will be with the full release of Fusion Applications, a member of the Cloud Club.  That leaves stragglers like SAP to still deal with the conversion and I have a notion that the pace will only accelerate from here and I expect that if cloud computing is not the dominant paradigm today it will be in the not too distant future.

Unlike salesforce.com and other companies that entered the market and developed their products as native SaaS applications, legacy companies had a great deal of work to do to convert to the new paradigm.  Changing a technology paradigm is never easy or cheap — the last time we did this we went form mainframes to client-server or was it client-server to thin clients?  But changing the technology paradigm is only half the battle.  The other, harder and more intense job is changing the business model.

Companies do not always have to change their business models when they change software paradigms.  As a matter of fact I am not sure if the majority of software companies today ever had to make a business model shift before the advent of cloud computing.  But there’s really no option at this point if a company wants to get to the cloud.

Oracle’s shift to Fusion, like many other vendors’ shifts to the cloud, buffers the business model change by effectively breaking the shift into two hard but more digestible bites.  Oracle is fortunate in that it has a large number of products and it is acquiring more all the time.  As a financial exercise, when Oracle begins selling fusion applications, at least a part of the revenue will come in the form of subscriptions and I expect that subscription revenue will grow at the expense of traditional licensing over time.

Because Oracle offers multiple products including hardware (Exadata storage systems — and servers if the Sun merger is approved) the company’s financial results will be insulated from a big hit — something that pure software companies dread when they change models, especially if they are publicly held.

So, I am not a financial analyst, but my reading of the situation is that Oracle has positioned itself and its business well with Fusion.  When delivered in a service mode, the applications will be competitive with other market leaders.  The applications ought to find a big market in other nations where software might be too expensive for local tastes.  And there at least multi-tenancy should prove to be essential.

Meanwhile, the conventional license business should continue as a viable option for customers who prefer that mode for as long as those customers want it.  Converting from the license paradigm to a more or less pure cloud paradigm will be a business decision and the required development will consist of rewriting contracts, building web sites and adjusting marketing.

This isn’t all guaranteed to happen but it looks like a promising and logical evolution.  Of course, I am reading “The Black Swan” right now and I am wondering about something highly improbable affecting this rosy scenario.

Key Findings for OOW #3 — The Fusion Edition

Fusion is big, potentially powerful, based on new technology, backward compatible and not available yet.

Larry Ellison began taking the wraps off Fusion at his Open World keynote on Wednesday.  His appearance on Sunday with Sun CEO Scott McNealy was just for poking some fun at IBM, this was the real deal.  Fusion is a big idea and this post will leave something out – that’s a given – but here are some important impressions.

There are ten applications and I don’t write fast enough to have copied them all down from Larry’s slide.  For sure there was CRM but also GL, Deal Management, Territory and Talent Management too.

The applications are based on SOA architecture, the UIs have embedded BI.  There are six thousand database tables, 6,500 objects, 20,000 views, 10,000 task flows and the applications are code complete and being tested by customers.

Fusion is based on industry standards like JAVA Fusion middleware which Larry said is the first such deployment.

Fusion applications are scheduled to debut next year and while that is a little disappointing it is entirely in keeping with the purpose of a keynote – forward looking statements right?  Ok.

I saw some demos but as I said in a previous post, I want to see a birth certificate.

Fusion applications are modular and they are designed to be deployed as full replacements for other older Oracle products.  Modularity enables them to also work side by side with existing applications so that there is no need for a wholesale replacement.  There are also new applications that have no analogs with the older product suites so it is good that Fusion and legacy applications can work together.

Like a lot of CRM products coming out these days, the Fusion applications, based on a SOA architecture are intended to operate behind your firewall in a single tenant manner or at some other data center in either single or multi-tenant mode.  This approach neatly straddles the diverse deployment options that some people feel they need today and gives a company like Oracle the flexibility to support all of them with one code set.  This neatly solves the problem of how to convert Oracle’s product set from premise-bound to cloud resident by leaving the decision to the customer.  That’s good, fine even and it does a lot to close the discussion about on-premise vs. on-demand, or does it?

The trouble with running a private cloud is that as soon as I make a modification to the system I might be making the product unique and unsupportable putting me back into the same version conundrum that many hope to avoid.  I need to know more about this.

Interestingly, in no demo did anyone talk about Fusion code or coding beyond Larry’s statement about JAVA.  I suspect that is not because you can’t get into coding some arcane part of your application but I hope coding is infrequent and at a level of abstraction sufficiently removed from the guts of the operation to make it possible to have one version of code for the whole planet.

The Fusion applications, specifically the CRM stuff, are compatible with Oracle’s Social CRM gadgets and widgets and I expect that it will offer fairly robust support for enterprise computing when the applications hit the street.

The UI looks nice.  I don’t know what the technology is that supports it but it has an Adobe Flex look.  Nice job on that – it will give all those Gen Y people coming into sales and other front office disciplines a feeling that they are using something as modern as the games they play on the home computer.

That’s about all I feel qualified to say.  We need to see more but for now it is very good to see Oracle redeeming a promise it made a few years ago when it went on a buying spree in the front office market.

Key Findings for OOW #2

This time a little more serious.  Ok?

I am a software and CRM guy so that’s the focus of this piece.  Much of Oracle Open World (OOW) was table setting.  It was all interesting and valuable but it was also a lot of independent data points.  There was lots of cool CRM introduced for sure but it all lacked a certain coherence until the Fusion announcements.  That’s not a bad thing by the way, just a reflection of the maturity level of so many products.  Some interesting stuff:

Support for retailers and anyone who wants to support employees who are directly involved with customers.  For example, handheld applications that bring customer information to devices in support of sales clerks.  Not just the customer’s size and account numbers but things like intelligent offers and any loyalty points accumulated so that a pricing negotiation can happen on the spot.  The same technology supports users on their mobile devices to do things like buy train tickets and other self-service purchases.  This was not really new for Oracle but it has been improved and it looks better with each iteration.

I have several problems with the self-service example though.  The demo was from the Swedish Rail Service and it showed how customers can buy travel packages and trade in frequency travel points –  you get the idea.  But there’s no infrastructure for this in the U.S. of A.  For this application to work we need a high-speed rail infrastructure and that will take about ten years (LOL).  Good thing Oracle is looking at foreign markets.

I attended the afternoon half of a Chief Sales Officer Executive Summit or some such thing on Wednesday afternoon.  It was very good.  Lots of high-octane sales executives from billion-dollar (or equivalent) companies talking about their success with Oracle-Siebel and Oracle CRM On-Demand and their successes.  They had an economist give a quick analysis of the world economy and for a practitioner of the dismal science, he sounded upbeat.  I regard this as a contra indicator of something, just not sure what.

No surprises there in the following sense.  CRM and SFA are pretty mature, the biggest gains we are likely to see going forward will likely be in more enlightened use of the products by the high-octane talent.  I am not optimistic in the short term for the following reasons.

Anthony Lye did a good job presenting the state of the union in SFA mediated selling today.  Most people still use spreadsheets to make forecasts — letting error and unpredictability enter every time a sales manager decides to spiff up the data or apply a fudge factor.  Lye’s slides showed only a tiny fraction of users had forecasts that were worth anything (i.e. accuracy rating of 90% or better) yet we keep messing with the data.

I have an idea.  Rather than futzing with the data in spreadsheets, let the forecasts stand as they are and make accuracy a criterion for sales compensation.  Then stand back and watch things improve.  Short-term pain for long-term gain.

Ok, Oracle showed plenty of good technology (including Fusion apps as part of some demos) like that described above, for B2C segments and even more for B2B but the thing you come away with is that Oracle is really focused on the enterprise.  Oracle has a lot for the mid-market user – it’s more about what you don’t buy in that case – but they really groove on the sophisticated and complex selling that goes on in billion dollar companies.  They have apps that solve problems that mid-market companies might not even encounter.

For example, the Oracle deal management application takes a lot of data about what a customer has bought already, their price tolerance, the value of a deal, what other companies might be paying for similar deals and derives a statistically relevant price for the deal.  This happens automagically after the sales representative has fed a few data items into the system.  Management, meanwhile, had set a few parameters in the system and out pops a price that the boss will, if not love, then certainly tolerate.

Smaller companies don’t do this kind of thing much.  They’re focused on closing as much business as they can at the end of the quarter.  Too bad, because Lye’s slide deck included one chart that showed the 30% of companies knew they were leaving money on the table – but they were not sure how much they were leaving.  Maybe there is broad applicability for deal management.  Ya think?

My impression of the related sales applications is that they were best for companies that sell to managed accounts.  You know what I mean, two companies have long term relationships and sell parts, components, raw food and the like to a large group of repeat customers.  That’s not the only kind of business they do but it’s significant and the Oracle apps work well in that large environment.

Oracle also has some apps that I find more interesting for things like territory planning and while they got some attention in the executive summit I could have used to see more.  My favorite is something that helps find the “white space” in a territory.  I wasn’t familiar with the term white space until this week but now I can use it almost as much as the Governator says technology.

What white space refers to is the knowledge that a territory acts like a buffer.  It can absorb only so much before it gets saturated (think of a kitchen sponge here).  Once the buffer is saturated it won’t absorb more so it’s smart to know at the start of a year how full your territory is – especially if you plan to assign quotas that your people have a realistic shot at making.  Ok, the white space application helps the manager figure this out by taking account of things like the target density in the territory, what’s already been sold, the average sales cycle, price points and other relevant information.  That’s cool and my only critique of this and other cool stuff is that Oracle didn’t show it off enough for my taste.

These are some of the applications that separate Oracle from other SFA vendors and they represent some true differentiation.  I hope they do more with these apps.

I was going to write about Fusion now but this post is getting long so the next post will be about Fusion.