Hosted Customer Relationship Management

Oracle Buys InQuira to Boost Fusion CRM

Terms of the deal, which is expected to close later this year, were not disclosed. Privately held InQuira has more than 85 customers, including Yahoo, 3M, Sprint and AVIS. Its technology is meant to help companies improve the effectiveness of their customer-service operations by helping call center representatives find accurate answers to customer questions, as well as allowing customers to find answers on their own through self-service portals and community forums.

The company has patented NLP (natural language processing) capabilities that enable it to determine the "true intent" of a customer question, according to its website.

"We expect InQuira to be the centerpiece for Oracle Fusion CRM Service," said Anthony Lye, senior vice president of Oracle CRM, in a statement.

Fusion CRM is part of Oracle's long-gestating Fusion Applications, a next-generation suite designed to include the best features from its various product lines. The long-delayed software is now in what Oracle calls "controlled availability" after six years of development.

Despite the massive in-house engineering effort Oracle undertook to build Fusion Applications, the InQuira purchase suggests that some aspects of the Fusion portfolio will be filled in via acquisition.

Oracle will get a head start with InQuira, since they share many customers and InQuira's software has been integrated with Oracle's CRM On Demand software since 2009.

Inquira has also partnered with SAP and IBM. Business "will continue as usual" for InQuira partners until the deal is completed, and afterward they will benefit from increased investment in the product, Oracle said.

Oracle's move made sense to one observer.

InQuira "is one of the top knowledge management vendors in the business," said analyst Ray Wang, CEO of Constellation Research. "They've been positioning for a sale to Oracle or SAP for the past 24 months."

While knowledge management is "a critical component" of CRM systems, most have "a big gap in this area," Wang added.

It might seem that a vendor such as Oracle, which already had content management and enterprise search capabilities, could build out its own knowledge management system. But the fact is that knowledge management is "a specialized niche," not only in terms of technology but the customer base, Wang said.

Chris Kanaracus covers enterprise software and general technology breaking news for The IDG News Service. Chris's e-mail address is Chris_Kanaracus@idg.

Web Based CRM Anatomy | Technology Information

To many people web based CRM is not a familiar term, this article provides an introductory guide to CRM systems and the unique benefits offered by Web Based CRM programs.

We’ll start at the very beginning, what is a CRM system? Put simply CRM stands for customer relationship management. So it is software designed to help you better manage customer relationships. This is quite a simplistic explanation, as you’ll learn many Web Based CRM packages offer so much more.

Many Web based CRM systems include bonus features such as web integration, sales forecasting and document management. There are even a select few Web based CRMs that also incorporate inventory management and accounting together into the one system. These systems are arguably the most efficient choice as they allow you to run all your company affairs of your business from the one system,preventing duplicate data, lost records and enhancing communication.

This brings us to the next point. What is the difference between a web based CRM and more traditional CRM options?

In the early days of customer relationship management software people mostly used desktop solutions. So a system that was installed in an individual computer to store and manage your client data. Those systems were adequate for single person sales teams but anything more than that and things would begin to get messy. These systems were (and are) just like any other application you store on your local computer, there was no way to share data betweenmultiple team members and keeping the data up to date became a constant struggle.

This is why many companies moved to internally hosted CRM systems. This is CRM software hosted on an internal server. Meaning that multiple people can log into the system from different computers (hooked up to the office network) and access the same system and the same data. This eliminated many of the communication issues and duplicate data although raised awhole host of other issues.

Internal servers do not come cheap and purchasing the equipment is just the beginning. Set up and ongoing maintenance can also be a considerable drain on company finances. Internal Servers are often more unreliable, leading to down time (when the system and data is unavailable crippling you’re workforce) and potential for data loss. Additional problems can arise depending on the particular software concerned and how regularly it is updated. Sadly many internally hosted CRM providers do not include updates in their yearly licensing fees, leaving companies paying top dollar for outdated software.

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