As the world media is talking about Thailand’s flood situation and the concern grows about the citizen’s safety, Thai government and various other organizations are busy organizing support for the affected people. As they are busy collecting money or other donations, gathering volunteers, reaching out to people etc., technology can help a lot. It can be used to make the process of relief work much easier, smoother and make sure everyone is getting the required help.

Sometime back, Oracle CRM On Demand was used in a similar scenario, to help citizens from a wild fire situation. This CRM system was deployed in a matter of 4 days and was one of the primary reasons the relief work was completed in record time, with excellent results. You can read more about this in the following links:

http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/customers/department-of-human-services-crm-081896.pdf

http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/profit/features/070810-bushfires-161520.html

http://medianetwork.oracle.com/video/player/96363577001

Oracle Corp. on Monday said it’s buying RightNow Technologies Inc. for $1.5 billion, expanding its cloud computing arsenal, three weeks after rival Salesforce.com sought to minimize the tech giant’s efforts in the major corporate IT trend. Check out the link below for more information

http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/press/519740

Is Social Media changing the way we do business? Our CRM Analysts C. Surya and Deepak Choudhury have done a very interesting analysis:

Social media has not only changed the way people communicate. It has changed the way customers look at brands. Customer service is no longer about after-sales support.  It means collaborating with your customers and prospects at every stage of product/service creation, delivery and support. Brands can’t expect customers to write to them or call them with their suggestions and grievances. You need to be where your customers are and interact with them and make them feel at home.

According to Social CRM Expert Harish Kotadia:

“Levels of customer engagement will determine mind-share and market-share for a brand. Only those companies that effectively engage their customers and prospects will emerge as winners and those that are not good in customer engagement will lose market share. Unlike in industrial age, not involving customers during product/service creation and delivery, and very limited after-sale support via phone is not going to work anymore. Companies need to use social media channels and collaborate with their customers at every step of product or service creation and delivery.

To survive and grow in the age of social media, companies will have to re-engineer their product design, manufacturing, delivery and support processes, and not just their marketing processes, in order to involve customers at every stage of product/service creation and delivery.

Companies that succeed in involving customers at every step of product/service creation, delivery  and support will thrive and grow. Rest will become history. Question is how many senior executives realize the challenge that is in front of them and are prepared to make this transition?”

Take a scenario in the CRM domain. Two clients buy CRM systems and implement it from 2 different vendors.

Vendor 1 completes the project as per specifications, within the budget and delivers it on time and then vanishes.

Vendor 2 does all that and then helps the client get the best out of the new CRM system-

• Offers training to help them use the system in the best possible way
• Clearly sets expectations about the system
• Creates relevant customizations for various departments
• Offers extended support
• Helps them change their business process to optimize the usage of CRM
• Ensures that the customer gets all the possible benefits from the system

It’s clear that customers will go for Vendor 2 in today’s world. Customers look for relations more than transactional business offers from vendors. Social media has changed the way businesses work. Your customer interactions will make the difference from being a profitable company to being a great company.

Oracle has launched their Social Network Solution today. It is very interesting, and seems to be doing much more than a typical Social  CRM app  : realtime conversations, multimedia support, Sharing, CRM Integration (Which CRM?), Chat, Web Conferencing, Search and more. Check out the link below for more information.

http://cloud.oracle.com/mycloud/f?p=service:social:0

Oracle Public Cloud offers self-service, subscription-based access to Oracle Fusion Applications, Oracle Fusion Middleware and Oracle Database as a service, including:

• Oracle Fusion CRM Cloud Service: designed to be effective, efficient and easy to use, Oracle Fusion Customer Relationship Management (CRM) delivers integrated sales and marketing with sales performance management that enables companies to generate more quality sales opportunities, increase their win rate and gain better value.
• Oracle Fusion HCM Cloud Service: built from the ground up to help customers do things their way, know their people better and work as a team, Oracle Fusion Human Capital Management (HCM) rethinks the business of HR to provide value to every person in an organization — from HR professionals to employees and managers.
• Oracle Social Network: an enterprise collaboration and social networking solution with a broad range of social tools designed to capture and share information amongst teams in the context of business processes and enterprise applications (such as CRM and HCM). Oracle Social Network enables natural conversations and jump-starts productivity with purposeful social networking without the noise of unrelated or random social conversations.
• Oracle Database Cloud Service: enterprise database service based on the industry’s #1 database, Oracle Database, providing access to database schemes, application development tools, data loading services, Web Services APIs, and a set of packaged business productivity applications.
• Oracle Java Cloud Service: enterprise platform for developing, deploying and managing business-critical Java Platform, Enterprise Edition (Java EE) applications based on Oracle WebLogic Server, the industry’s #1 application server. Supports development and deployment from multiple Java IDEs, including Oracle JDeveloper, NetBeans and Eclipse.

All Oracle Public Cloud services have a unified self-service user interface for provisioning, monitoring and managing all services.

The recently held Oracle Open World 2011 was a huge success with knowledge-filled sessions attended by the crème of the technology audience. The attendees found the event to be of great value, personally and professionally.

Now that the event is over, Oracle is offering videos and downloads for the ones who missed the event. You can download all the presentations from the link given below.

https://oracleus.wingateweb.com/scheduler/eventcatalog/eventCatalog.do

You can also watch video replays on the Oracle YouTube channel. Check the link below for details

http://www.youtube.com/Oracle

Oracle Public Cloud is a broad set of best-in-class, integrated services that provide customers with subscription-based, self-service access to the following, which would be completely managed, hosted and supported by Oracle:

• Oracle Fusion Applications
• Oracle Fusion Middleware
• Oracle Database
• Oracle Fusion Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Cloud Service
• Oracle Fusion Human Capital Management (HCM) Cloud Service
• Oracle Social Network
• Oracle Java Cloud Service
• Oracle Database Cloud Service

Important Features:

• Runs on Oracle Engineered Systems, providing customers and partners with a high-performance, reliable, elastic, and secure infrastructure for their critical business applications.
• Customers/ Organizations can use the already existing standard Java and Oracle Database applications and deploy them to the Oracle Public Cloud without rewriting them, thereby allowing them to take advantage of their existing IT assets, skills and ecosystems.
• Pricing is based on a monthly subscription model, and each service can be purchased independently.

Advantages:

• Offers customers with a complete range of business applications and technology solutions, avoiding the problems of data and business process fragmentation when customers use multiple siloed public clouds.
• Provides customers with truly flexible deployment by enabling them to run the exact same business applications in the cloud and on-premise.
• Provides many common services, including resource management and isolation, security, data exchange and integration, virus scanning, white list management, and centralized self-service monitoring.

Customers who are interested in Oracle’s Public Cloud, want to learn about the services, or register to use these services can do so at http://cloud.oracle.com