Oracle Debuts CRM On Demand Release 20

Oracle announced the latest version of its CRM On Demand product today, which includes various "enhancements to the core" of the solution.

According to Anthony Lye, Oracle's senior vice president for CRM, "We've had minor releases in between major releases, so customers have continued to get new functionality and enhanced capabilities from us on a regular basis for the last seven or eight years.

"CRM On Demand has been generally available to our customer base for almost seven years now, and Fusion was made generally available about a year ago, so we certainly have a large customer base on CRM On Demand applications," Lye told CRM magazine.

One of the focal points of the CRM On Demand Release 20 lies in the industry-specific vertical, with new contact management capabilities geared toward the life sciences, financial services, insurance, and automotive industries. For instance, life science companies can record and monitor sample product drops to make sure that their organization follows complex industry rules and regulations incumbent upon them in their respective fields.

Improvements extend beyond verticals, says Lye. "We've made enhancements in what we call horizontals—marketing, sales, and service—[as well as] to things like account planning, customer assessment, the customer model, and territory management."

In regard to cross-industry functionality upgrades, the latest release incorporates a set of time- and cost-saving features, such as shareable addresses, that allow multiple contacts and user accounts to create, search, validate, or lock address entries for editing.

Other enhancements include:

User interface: Optionally displayed related information as tabs, as well as a simple search for administrators to create optimal search layouts and restricted searchable fields
Unique business needs solutions: Additional child object support, added Web services code, increased integration events for merge and restored records, enhanced administrative Web services to migrate page layouts, Web applets, and homepages
Enhanced mobility: Greater mobile support for iPad, iPhone, Blackberry, and Microsoft Outlook with enhancements to both connected and disconnected mobile applications

"[Release 20] demonstrates a strong commitment to innovation, so I think it's another demonstration of our commitment to our customers," Lye says. "We're very pleased with our Fusion [CRM Cloud Service] results, and we have a lot of customers on CRM On Demand...so we're going to try to make those customers successful."