In a move to temper its sagging consulting revenues, Oracle Corp. soon will begin offering hosted implementations of its software applications, beginning with a 90-day hosted version of its CRM (customer relationship management) software, the company announced Tuesday.
The slimmed-down deployment is part of Oracle’s “War on Complexity,” a philosophy geared to urging enterprise customers to end application customization and instead mold their business processes to fit Oracle applications.
Oracle has ingrained common business processes into its implementation process to speed deployment, said Jeremy Burton, Oracle senior vice-president of products and services market.
“It’s only by removing complexity from the business that our customers are going to save money,” Burton said. “Customers … want software to work out of the box. You’ve got to change your business.”
Enterprises need to change business processes in areas such as human resources and marketing, which are not key business differentiators, he said.
“They want best-of-breed processes … that are going to be efficient, that are going to save them money. We don’t allow people to go in and change the software. The goal is to get 80 per cent of what the customer’s needs in the first 90 days,” Burton said.
Although the company initially is focusing on the CRM arena, other applications soon will be available for deployment via a hosted environment, said Larry Ellison, Oracle chairman and CEO. The company is trying to engineer the implementation process as it has engineered its software, he said.