Oracle’s Siebel CRM continues to deliver innovative new solutions to customers—including six major releases and a newly published product roadmap highlighting planned annual innovation packs through 2015.

We asked Oracle’s Aaron Shidler, vice president of CRM product strategy and management, to provide insight into Oracle’s ongoing commitment to Oracle’s Siebel CRM solutions—including the latest round of product innovations.

Q. Please give us a big-picture look into Oracle’s commitment to its Siebel solutions.
A. The track record speaks for itself. Since the acquisition, Oracle’s Siebel team has delivered six major releases, containing 39 new products and more than 525 enhancements across 21 industry-specific solutions. Such a commitment makes sense when you have thousands of customers and millions of users—including many very large companies relying on Oracle’s Siebel products for their CRM needs.

Q. What does Oracle’s Siebel team have planned for 2013 and beyond? 
A. We’ve made a clear commitment to Oracle’s Siebel customers via our product roadmap and statement of direction to deliver new and innovative solutions on a regular basis. We are currently planning to introduce these solutions in our annual innovation packs and fix packs. And we expect these innovations to be shaped by our regular customer advisory board meetings, where customers are partnering with Oracle to deliver mobile, social, and customer experience solutions that are easy for their customers, partners, and employees to use.

Q. Everyone is talking about customer experience (CX) these days. How is Oracle’s Siebel team addressing the CX imperative?
A. Oracle’s Siebel is innovating in several areas to drive excellent customer experiences: usability, cross-channel enablement, and mobile.

The main driver for creating a great customer experience is usability—enabling simplicity and productivity for all types of users. To support this in a modern way, we needed to deliver a solution that could be accessed by any browser, via any device, and that leveraged the latest, greatest UI controls. With our latest release, Siebel delivers on all this with a user interface that is

• Contemporary. Siebel runs in all browsers and all browser-capable devices using the latest Web technology standards, such as JavaScript, CSS, and HTML 5, while providing a native application user experience.
• Productive. Siebel is designed for a user experience that reduces clutter and user keystrokes.
• User-sensitive. The user experience enables Siebel to adapt to the needs of users—their preferences, their devices, and their desire to complete processes efficiently and effectively.

In terms of cross-channel enablement, Siebel supports a complete set of buy-and-own processes that span multiple channels and leverage multiple Oracle assets. Siebel has lowered the total cost of ownership for customers by providing more than a dozen integrations, including

• Oracle Commerce Solution (formerly ATG) for cross-channel Web commerce
• Oracle Knowledge Management (formerly InQuira) for integrated contextual knowledge used for contact center and self-service capabilities
• Oracle’s Social Relationship Marketing tools for social campaigns and lead generation

Finally, Siebel’s open UI delivers support for mobile platforms across a full range of browsers and devices, including support for device integration, location services, and phone, URL, and contact integration. The same solution customers enjoy in a variety of channels today can be delivered on mobile devices by leveraging out-of-the-box templates or creating your own look and feel. We plan to add disconnected mobile operations in 2013.

Q. Oracle recently acquired several social relationship management (SRM) solutions, including Vitrue and Collective Intellect. How can these acquisitions benefit Oracle’s Siebel customers? 
A. We have several plans to leverage our new social capabilities in 2013.

First, we are in the process of delivering an extended schema to support the collection of social attributes that augment customer profiles. This will enable customers to not only know and segment their customers by their transactions, but also create new segments of customers based on social attributes.

In addition to social listening, we are enabling the creation of service requests and leads from our social listening solutions. This will enable our customers to respond to unhappy customers using the power of Siebel Service to resolve the issue and notify the customer directly or through the origin of the complaint. Additionally, companies can listen for customer issues with their competitors’ solutions and create a lead to track to gain market share.

Finally, integration of Oracle’s Siebel marketing solutions with Oracle social relationship management solutions will enable marketers to combine traditional and social channels to maximize reach, relevance, and revenue—plus deliver a rich cross-channel customer experience.

Q. Besides CX and SRM, what other strategic areas is the Oracle Siebel team focused on?
A. The Oracle Siebel team is also delivering value for customers in industry innovations and improved total cost of ownership (TCO). For example, key innovations in our December 2012 release include the following.

Industry Innovations

• Next-generation connected mobile solutions for consumer goods and life sciences will enable key industry processes such as retail merchandising and rep sample drops with a fresh and intuitive user interface that leverages the capabilities of modern mobility to simplify and enhance the day of the sales representative.
• For the public sector, we continue to enhance support for complex citizen self-service. We are streamlining the user experience and accessibility for employees, as well as updating eligibility determination for multiple benefit plans and the latest version of Oracle Policy Automation.
• Order-to-bill customer and product integration for utilities companies will enable a productized and supported software integration approach, facilitating a robust integration between Siebel CRM and Oracle Utilities Customer Care and Billing.

TCO Innovations

• Standardization on high-performance Oracle technology for Web services deployment, business analytics reports, and secure enterprise search, including Oracle Exalogic and Oracle Exadata servers.
• Oracle Enterprise Data Quality enables organizations to measure, improve, and manage the quality of data from any domain, including customer data. Oracle Enterprise Data Quality is now integrated with Siebel CRM and Oracle Customer Hub to provide reliable customer data within CRM or across the enterprise. New abilities include matching customer information based on any attribute or child entity, address validation, and standardization, along with better performance.
• Optimized marketing campaign performance created by generating and assigning source code—wave IDs—in dynamic batches greatly reduces time to launch for large multiwave outbound campaigns, and helps organizations improve marketing effectiveness.

Find out more about Oracle’s Siebel CRM.

This content is intended to outline our general product direction. It is intended for information purposes only, and may not be incorporated into any contract. It is not a commitment to deliver any material, code, or functionality, and should not be relied upon in making purchasing decisions. The development, release, and timing of any features or functionality described for Oracle’s products remains at the sole discretion of Oracle.

Source: http://www.oracle.com/us/dm/nsl100152787-siebelcrm-1906688.html?msgid=3-7893378158

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I know it’s been a while since I last posted. I’ve just been too buzy and caught up, and also, waiting for something really interesting to come up that I could add to my log

I had Oracle Policy Modelling (OPA / OPM) software installed on my local development machine. All of a sudden, I noticed that my Excel documents were not being compiled. Also, the existing Excel documents, I wasn’t able to use or recompile them in projects.

Googling as always, I came across an interesting solution that I wish to share with all of you -
Modeling AddIn for Excel:
1) Open the Excel document outside Oracle Policy Modeling.
2) Select Excel Options from the Office Menu (circle at top left). Select Add-Ins, then find
Manage: Excel Add-Ins, and click on Go…
3) Place a tick in the Oracle Policy Modeling Excel 2007 check box (if it is already ticked, try unticking,
clicking OK, and ticking it again).
4) Click on the OK button.
5) Try opening the workbook again in Oracle Policy Modeling.
If the Oracle Policy Modeling AddIn for Excel does not appear in step 3, you should be able to locate
it in the templates directory of the Oracle Policy Modeling installation. The default location is:
C:\Program Files\Oracle\Policy Modeling\templates\Oracle Policy Modeling Excel 2007.xlam

When I ran it in my computer, this was mysteriously the issue. I am still wondering as to how the OPM Add-In got disabled in the first place, but, that is another part of the discussion!

Do let me know if this works for you as well.

Source : https://forums.oracle.com/forums/thread.jspa?messageID=10526297&tstart=0#10526297

There were activities created for SR as a result of Email Response and properly visible in Activity List Applet under SR. We have Pick Applet in SR Applet for fetching all Email related activities. But strangely same activities were not visible in the Pick Applet.

On investigation, we found that the Applet was based on a different BC i.e. Action Special.
Seeing Different BC It is understood there is a problem of Record Visibility.
And since BC Record visibility is controlled by BusComp View Mode, there were bound to be some issues.
We compared Action and Action Special BCs BusComp View Mode.

Following was the screenshot of BC -Action Special (click to enlarge)

Siebel BC Action-special screenshot

Following was the screenshot of BC-Action (click to enlarge)

Siebel BC-Action screenshot

Above Snapshot shows the difference clearly !!

As a Solution –
1) We made Action Special similar to Action BC and added Visibilty MVF as Organization and Visibility MVL as Organization.
2) Compiled SRF.
3) Login in dedicated Client.
Shock!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
It was throwing error of Wrong User Id and Password while few minutes back it was working fine.
Login again- Shock again-error again.

3rd Time Login (3 is my lucky number ), but error again but this time my luck was better. So error changed to something different and is indicated below (click to enlarge) -

Siebel Error - BC MVF Configuration issue

Since Organization MVL was not present in Action Special, I was not able login into the dedicated client.
Actually I did the View Mode Change by Compare Object utility on Action and Action Special BC. This smartness and laziness created the whole issue because compare object put the MVL and MVF even though MVL/MVF was not present in BC.

If you change the Visibility MVL/MVF Manually then you would not allowed by Siebel to pick MVL/MVF that is not present in BC.

But it is really good for me. Since I have learnt a lesson and that is generic.

Conclusion-If the Reference of MVL or MVF is not present in BC then you would not able to login Siebel Dedicated Client and you can expect to get the below error.
—————————
User ID or password that you entered is incorrect.
Please check the spelling and try again.
—————————

Thanks for reading. Stay tuned for more articles !!

Well, with all the talk coming out of Oracle stable for all these months, even if it IS generally available, it may not make for a good business case for all businesses to jump for it right away.

Oracle has made available different components of the Fusion Apps stack in a piecemeal fashion. Click here to access the complete Price List released on 1 June, 2011.

Fusion Applications Stack has been a product which Oracle claims it has built right from the ground up. Though they have leveraged the good business principles of the various products, technically it has been built from scratch. Let’s investigate each of the inputs one by one.

Do we know what all has actually gone into creating this so-called, a wonderful, revolutionary, and ground-breaking product from Oracle ?

Let’s investigate the process that Oracle has followed and the results that they have been focussing on during the development cycle of Oracle Fusion Apps.

The product Oracle Fusion Apps has been made with the “customer” in mind (now that’s a refreshing change! What was kept in mind when developing other products ?? ). Quite obviously, if it’s a customer-centric product, the first thing that would be needed is a very strong interaction with the Customer. Oracle representatives have been doing that very well, by making a large number of visits to the customers who were involved deeply in the Oracle Fusion Apps development from the very beginning.

You would want to interact with the customers more and more when coming out with this type of product. It is said 1,350 usability participants from 20 different industries were considered.

Lulit Bezuayehu, a Principal Usability Engineer with the Oracle Applications UX team who worked on Fusion HCM features says, “We created user profiles based on the site visits that we conducted, and then developed roles to really understand what roles are involved in what activities. During the site visits, we would just sit at the end user’s desk and watch, seeing all the shortcuts and tips and tricks that they’ve come up with to overcome usability issues. We took copies of cheat-sheets and uncovered pain points. It was really interesting and very, very valuable.”

During Customer visits, Oracle formed “Focus Groups” to focus on specific parts of the application to ensure the best solutions, bit by bit, and then integrating them all together.

These visits would make use of personal interviews, feedback sessions, surveys and polls from amongst the candiates to arrive at the best possible solution for the new product. UI, for example, would have a very strong focus on usability.

Another one of the techniques used widely in this research by Oracle was the “eye tracking research”. Typically, the screen we look at is a rectangular object on a computer, or a hand held device. However, we as humans don’t focus on the complete screen all the same. There is a higher focus, for example, towards the left of the screen where we start reading a statement from (We read English from Left to right). Also, we may be inclined to think that there would be a higher focus around the top of the screen, than to the lower portions for the same reasons.

The response to such diligent research has been positive, Bezuayehu said. “In almost every feedback session we’ve done since then with prototypes, customers say, ‘Oh wow, I can’t wait to get my hands on this.’ They’re very eager to actually use the product.”

All said and done, the real litmus test is going to be when the product becomes generally available to the organizations globally, and their real world feedback of them. Ahoy Oracle, better get your Customer Feedback Management systems / software up and working well before that.

To whatever I have leant and seen so far, UI is the only interesting part. Rest just looks like old wine in a new bottle. Only time will tell whether it’s yet another marketing gimmick, or Oracle really has an Ace up its sleeve this time around.

For regular updates on Oracle Fusion Applications, join our Linkedin group here -
LINKEDIN : Oracle Fusion Stack – CRM, ERP, Middleware, SOA, AIA, Integration

Watch Justin Kestelyn, Senior Director, OTN & Developer Programs, Oracle Corp. share all about it in the video below -

I’ll start this series with the prerogative, something that you see first whenever you hop onto a new application – the UI, and why everybody at Oracle is so gung-ho about it !

Let’s investigate the process that Oracle has followed and the results that they have been focussing on during the development cycle of Oracle Fusion Apps.

One of the most ground-breaking development, Oracle says, has been on the UI front. With a focus on the HCM (Human Capital Management) component of the Fusion Apps stack, in a typical organization today, there are a myriad of applications in use. The employees, or the users of the applications, keep shuttling from one of the them to the other to find the needed information, at the time of its need. For eg. Payroll, Compensation, or Benefits.

Fusion apps eliminates this need by working as the single window information system. The Fusion Applications will have the capability to pull data from different applications, and show it to the user at a single location, or in a single screen, perhaps.

Aylin Uysal, the Senior Manager of Oracle’s HCM User Experience team claims the above since Oracle had clearly invested heavily before the Development of Oracle Fusion Apps even started. Thus, they claim they had a very good ground to get to know from the customer as to what he wanted, implemented it, went back to him to show the mockups, and took his approval at every step in the UI development.

Gretchen Alarcon, Oracle’s Vice President of Product Strategy for HCM, reinforces the above. He says that starting with the Customers in the product development has paid off (How do you know that? The customers haven’t adopted Fusion apps yet!). She says, “We had a real focus within Fusion HCM on making sure that this is a product that is very, very customer-driven”. She claims Oracle utilized the services of dedicated UX resources to carry out the above cycles with the customers.

I guess it’s just getting a little too hot. Oracle, do make sure you are not raising the expectations soo high, that even a good product fails to meet the expectations once it’s generally available. Just a piece of friendly advice!

Wondering if somebody has access to the Oracle Fusion Apps UI Testing Checklist. Would be really interesting to take a look at that, and as to how well it adheres to the modern UI design preferences..

Read our recent coverages on Oracle Fusion Apps..
ORACLE FUSION APPLICATIONS’ UNIQUE DESIGN PRINCIPLES
LET’S UPGRADE SIEBEL CRM TO FUSION APPS “RIGHT NOW” !!
INSIDE ORACLE FUSION APPS : CRM PERSPECTIVE

It seems, it was all true. Richard Bingham from Oracle has authored a new book, “Managing Oracle Fusion Applications”, through the Oracle Press.

Fusion Apps Cover page

The book is said to explain, how to use a wide range of Tools, Services and Best practices to manage Oracle Fusion Applications, the so-called next generation Enterprise Applications.

Richard Bingham, is probably a member of the Oracle team designing the support strategy for Oracle Fusion Applications, and that is how he has the inside information on Oracle Fusion Apps architecture, and how to design a Support Strategy around it !

The book claims to show readers how to achieve application uptime, improved performance, and the lower TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) through the effective system management principles outlined in the book.

The book is said to include both the product and technical overviews for Oracle Fusion applications, and also a wide range of toolboxes focussing on reliability, availability and more.

It’s a 352 page book which helps -

• Understand the components and architecture of Oracle Fusion Applications
• Plan, develop, and implement an effective application management plan
• Resolve reliability issues with Oracle Enterprise Manager
• Configure and deploy applications from the Oracle WebLogic Server Administration Console
• Adjust run-time parameters using Java Management Extensions and MBeans
• Generate and distribute reports using Oracle Business Intelligence 11g
• Establish solid user authentication, access control, and data protection policies
• Work with Oracle Fusion Governance, Risk, and Compliance Intelligence

The Table of Contents in the book are -
  Chapter 1. A Fusion Applications Product Overview
  Chapter 2. A Fusion Applications Technical Overview
  Chapter 3. Successful Enterprise Application Management
  Chapter 4. The Fusion Applications Lifecycle
  Chapter 5. A Fusion Applications Management Toolbox
  Chapter 6. A Reliability Management Toolbox
  Chapter 7. The Availability Management Toolbox
  Chapter 8. A Performance Management Toolbox
  Chapter 9. An Optimization Management Toolbox
  Chapter 10. A Governance Management Toolbox
  Chapter 11. Getting and Staying Healthy
  Chapter 12. Planning for the Future
  Appendix A. Further Reading and References
  Index

To download the complete Table of Contents (TOC) PDF, click here.

Don’t ignore Chapter-1. With our limited knowledge of the Fusion Apps, being outside the Oracle’s round buildings, it could be very insightful.
To download a sample chapter (Chapter 1) of the book, click here.

Following are the prices, and the links for the book, currently available through major online book retailers -

Richard can be found on Twitter, and Linkedin as well.

psst.. if you have tolerated me this far, you are in for a bonus!
I found a link where you can get the legit copy of the above book for just $25. It seems the Oracle employees are being offered a flat 50% off on the book directly by Oracle Press making it by far the most inexpensive option around. Click here to access the discounted order page. Alternatively, you can also use the promo code, “opress” on the Oracle Press book buy page.

Just thinking about it, are you still looking around for crm gratis tools to help you manage your applications ?
This doesn’t quite seem to be the case. The book focusses on high quality, high availability, high *cost* applications to bail you out.

Here’s the link to get all your Oracle Press titles at 50% instant discount.

Happy reading !!

It details out the features in much more detailed manner, demoes Windows running on a wide variety of Hardware devices, talks about allowing the wonderful stuff like using the Accelerometer, Gyroscope, etc. in the Apps directly by the developers, and the follow up “Build” conference in September which will take the Developers closer to Windows 8.

If you don’t mind too much of talking by the host, check out the video below right now.. the real stuff begins after 5:20 ..

Do tell us in the comments as to what you think about it.

Some of our previous coverages on Oracle Fusion Apps include -
ORACLE FUSION APPLICATIONS’ UNIQUE DESIGN PRINCIPLES
INSIDE ORACLE FUSION APPS : CRM PERSPECTIVE

From the reports coming our way, the Oracle Fusion Apps is now available and easily accessible over the Oracle eDelivery network. It’s a mammoth 40 GB download, split into 11 parts. It is recommended for you to use a good Download manager to manage broken downloads, else, the complete download can be a real pain!

We understand that though it’s available for download, not everybody can download, install and start playing with it. It has actually been made available in a pretty restricted mode, in select geographies, and to a set of existing customers who are willing to experiment with it.

The customers are expected to reach out to their Oracle Sales reps in case they are interested.

Okay, I hit the download button on eDelivery Network, and it started downloading right away. So, that part is solved. Confirmed that the download is not restricted. But, I still wonder, where am I expected to get the license keys from ?

I tried reaching out on the Oracle License Codes website, and noticed that the website has not yet been updated with the License Codes for Oracle Fusion Apps. This further substantiates the claim that Oracle Fusion Apps is not for the general developer or Customer out there. It’s only been made available through their partners. Cognizant has been a major Oracle partner in the Oracle Fusion Apps, CRM Space.

Another thing I noticed is that with the Oracle’s famous “Unbreakable LINUX” push, the release is available only for the Linux platform, both 32 and 64 bit flavors.

The credit for breaking the news goes to Floyd Teter. To the best of our knowledge so far, he was the first one to break the news on eDelivery Fusion Apps downloads!

Alex has done a very good coverage on Oracle Fusion Apps on his blog, here.

Detailed comments by the UKOUG chairman Debra Lilley, are available on Computer World here.

Do share your comments and views on the new Oracle Products through the comments below.

US banking giant, Citigroup announced last friday, that it is acquiring the IT Services provider Ness Technologies Inc. (Nasdaq: NSTC; TASE: NSTC) for about $307 million. The acquisition is expected to be financed purely by cash.

Citigroup has a Venture Capital Arm by the name of Citi Venture Capital International (CVCI). The purported terms of the deal are $7.75 per share, approximately 17.6 percent premium over the last closing price of Ness on Nasdaq on Thursday.

About CVCI -

Established in 2001, CVCI is a leading private equity investor and investment adviser in developing markets. Private equity funds advised by CVCI have made investments principally in Asia (including Greater China and India), Central and Eastern Europe, Latin America and other regions where CVCI sees clear potential for growth and value creation.

With over 40 investment professionals across the globe, and with extensive local and regional networks throughout developing regions, CVCI currently manages over $7 billion in equity investments and committed capital. Our investment professionals have extensive experience in private equity investing with specific industry expertise in IT services, business services outsourcing, retailing, pharmaceuticals, telecom, renewable energy and financial services.

CVCI launched CVCI Growth Fund I in 2005 ($1.6 billion) and CVCI Growth Fund II in 2007 ($4.3 billion)

About Ness Technologies -

Ness is the right size to provide you with the deep partnership you need to realize your business and technology goals. It starts with making your goals our goals and ends with an inventive and flexible solution for your most pressing challenges. Our award-winning IT services, teams, and skill-sets scale globally as your business evolves and are delivered in the combination of on-site, near-shore or off-shore that works best for you.

The Ness portfolio of global services includes:

• Software Product Engineering
• Enterprise Applications & Business Services
• NessPRO Software Distribution

Major parts of the operations of Ness are in North America, Europe, Israel and India, has customers globally in over 20 countries. Its strength is the strategic alliances it has with vendors like EMC Documentum, Chordiant, IBM, HP, MS, Oracle and SAP.

Ness’s share prices rose 1.4% on Friday on Nasdaq to $6.68, giving a market cap of $255 million, and reportedly rose 13.6% in early trading on the TASE today to NIS 24.95.

Whether Citigroup will now pull back its IT Implementations and support to the mega vendors in the industry, and now use Ness’s Operative divisions, or whether the Ness division continues to service clients outside Citigroup, still needs to be seen.

It seems even though the paper outlining the exact vendor market share in the CRM Market for 2010 is not out yet, Oracle has some insider information about it (or so it claims). It says Oracle Corp. has retained its #1 spot for CRM Apps.

Key highlights -

• Oracle’s market share stands at 11.8% in 2010
• Oracle’s market share was 10.8% in 2009, meaning a growth rate of 15.9% in 2010 compared to the industry average of 6.2%

However, in the coverage, I found a few points especially strange.

What all is included in the market ?
I had always believed that there are only a couple of strong CRM contenders in the market today, and 11-12% market share to the top vendor looks really lack-lustre.

How have the calculations been done to arrive at this figure ?
What all sections of the Corporate sector have been considered as a part of the study ?

We all know that Oracle’s Siebel CRM is by far the most popular CRM for most of the big vendors in the market. However, surprisingly, Divya doesn’t talk about it at all in her News brief !

As per the information, there are 4 categories defined in CRM space -

• Contact Center
• Customer Service
• Marketing
• Sales

The oracle products listed out by Oracle representative herself are -

• CRM modules in EBS (incentive compensation, iStore, marketing, service, sales and trade management)
• CRM components of JDE
• CRM components of PeopleSoft
• Oracle CRM On Demand

To the best of my knowledge, EBS, JDE and PS are more of ERP/HRM applications than core CRM.

We all know that Oracle CRM OnDemand is a relatively newer entrant to the OnDemand CRM space, and is already facing an uphill task against the well-established competitors.

Looks like, there are a lot of open questions here for now. Maybe a complete report from IDC will help clear things out. You can estimate the quality, and the kind of reports that IDC provides by looking at a similar report on Worldwide On-Demand CRM Applications 2010–2014 Forecast and 2009 Vendor Shares

Too steep for me for now.

The information has been released by Divya Malik from Oracle.

What do you think? Any possibility of Microsoft making the dent with its next Windows ??

Tell us in the comments.. hang on.. your comments will appear after a while once approved..!!

After the desolate and failed bid to acquire Groupon, Google was widely rumored to be working on its own Groupon with the Google branding. Well, the cat is out of the bag now. Google has launched “Google Offers” as a straight, head-on competition to the daily coupons, and daily discount sites like Groupon, Livingsocial, sosasta, dailydeals, snapdeal, and many similar clones which most got going after the phenomenal success of Groupon.com.

Google Offers is a service that allows daily deals and special offers to be delivered right to your inbox. You can simply buy the coupon at a discounted price, and walk over the shop offering the deal of the day to redeem it.

Google, obviously, has a very big headway over the other vendors because of the tremendous customer base that it already enjoys. Moreover, Google Offers is said to be well integrated with the other Google services already like the Google Wallet, making it all the more easier to use.

Yes, the product is squarely aimed at Groupon (the biggest of all the clones), since Google does use the location information from your computer or your mobile phone to deliver the deals specific to your area. In the demonstration that google did, Google Wallet was used to make a purchase, and the Google Offers coupon that was available to be bought, was automatically applied to that item!

Check out how Google Offers for businesses works, in the video below

The service has already been rolled out in Portland, Ore. Read all about it on CNET.

Groupon is today valued at approximately $25 Billion after it announced its plans to come out with an IPO shortly. But, the industry analysts have also cautioned that this may be another Internet bubble since Groupon does not really have any assets, or a unique or non-replicable business model to justify these valuations. Just wondering, should Groupon have taken it up when Google offered upto $5 Billion for it ?!! How do I know it, *Rumours* I tell you !!

Another such extensive workshop is now being organized for the Oracle Partners for advanced tracks of -
- Business Process Management (BPM)
- Application Development Framework (ADF)
- WebCenter

All these sessions will take place at the Product Management HQ between June 20th until June 24th 2011, in Lisbon – Portugal.

There are a couple of really good things Oracle has done this time.
I noticed time and again when I attended these sessions, that people would register in bulk, and then fail to turn up on the day of the training.

One, Oracle has limited the participation to 2 participants per organization. So, make sure you are from the first 2 to grab those seats from your company!

Also, although the training is being conducted free of cost to the partners, there is a steep cancellation fee of 2.000 EUR, ouch!!

All in all, you better be serious when you are applying for this one. I am still not sure though as to how Oracle plans to recover the dues from defaulters in this case..

Third, Oracle has also put up some very strict skill requirements. If you are NOT hands-on with these products, these *advanced* tracks are not the ones for you. Oracle says, don’t apply, we’ll send you home!

Here are the training, and the registration details for these 3 courses -
- BPM Advanced Track
- ADF Advanced Track
- Webcenter Advanced Track

Well, it’s always good to hone our skills. They would obviously help us perform better in our current Job, or the next Job, or maybe just find a better Job in these tough times!

More about the Insider’s view of Oracle Fusion Middleware presentation by Oracle – Cognizant coming up after the break.

Cheers..

One of the major components of the to-be-released Oracle Applications stack is the Customer Relationship Management or the CRM part.

Oracle has been building this component with a strong support, and partnership with Cognizant, or so it appears. At the time of my writing this, there is a huge event that Oracle is organizing on 1st June, 2011, at 10 AM PDT where we are due to get the first insight into this new software.

As Oracle claims, you can get the *insider’s* point-of-view on Oracle Fusion Apps and the business drivers behind it. Oracle says, the Oracle Fusion CRM component will set a new standard for CRMs today in sales performance management, enterprise integration, sales force automate, planning and business flexibility. Just has me asking, are you telling me that your current offerings are not upto the mark with the competition ?

Rest is more of Cognizant brouhaha over how many implementations it has done, or the number of man-hours of Siebel CRM experience that CTS has. Big deal. My question, how many of the consultants who worked on the CRM implementations, are still with CTS ??
In our ever dynamic IT Industry where *qualified* CRM consultants are one of the hottest commodities around, churning and the manpower turnover ratios are pretty high for nearly all the outsourcing players.

Of course, US and Europe would rather keep it simple. Just hire as-needed on contracts !

On a serious note, I would say all of us should be attending this webinar, maybe because for many of us, our daily bread depends on Oracle corp, and it would be good to know what’s coming my way.

The proposed agenda and takeaways from the event are -

• Developing your Oracle roadmap and strategies to protect existing investments
• Maximize revenue potential and achieve better sales performance management
• Gaining a single view of your customer and harness the technical complexities of disparate systems

Some of speakers lined up for the event include -
Folia Grace, the Vice President of applications marketing for Oracle ERP and BI applications
As we know, Oracle Fusion HCM component peek-a-boo has already been offered by Oracle before. Folia has been related very closely to HCM development. Grace is helping to define and drive the market strategy for Oracle Human Capital Management, Financial Management, Project Management, Corporate Performance Management and BI Applications.

Philip Philippides is a Director and Practice Leader in Cognizant’s Customer Solution Practice
e began his career in high technology sales with over 13 years of successful sales and sales leadership. For the past 11 years has been focused on Sales Force Effectiveness strategy and process as well as Sales Force Automation (SFA) technology enablement. He has led dozens of lifecycle SFA implementations, as well as numerous customer strategy, customer experience, and sales effectiveness engagements.

Timothy Blank is a Director and Western Region Practice Leader responsible for: all Oracle CRM related business development activities, on-shore client facing delivery activities (focusing on oversight and quality assurance), personnel development, and thought leadership. He is focused on exceeding the year over year regional growth and performance metrics attributed to the organization as a whole by maintaining delivery excellence on all solution delivery opportunities. Tim is based out of Seattle, Washington and has been working with Oracle solutions for over 15 years

That’s all folks. If you may be interested, you can register for the event through the link below -
Oracle Fusion Apps : CRM perspective Registration Link

Complete Standards-Based Platform: Reduce Costs and Accelerate Innovation

• Reduce staffing overhead and training budgets through a foundation built on commercially available technology standards
• Enable IT consolidation and reduce management costs
• Accelerate the pace of change and time-to-market for new initiatives
• Create unique processes and differentiation

Complete User Experience: A Role-Based Approach to Increasing Productivity

• A tailored experience with built-in flexibility to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of your organization—from the executive leadership team to front-line workers and customers
• Incorporating more than 4,000 hours of customer input and testing involving more than 1,000 businesses and public sector organizations
• Embedded business intelligence accelerates the pace and accuracy of business decisions
• Integrated collaboration connects teams with the processes in which they participate
• Powerful Enterprise 2.0 technologies incorporate unstructured information—such as invoices, product manuals, and business documents—into structured processes for richer experiences and better-informed decisions

Complete Choice: A Flexible Approach to Adoption and Deployment

• A complete yet modular approach enables the uptake of Oracle Fusion Applications at your pace and on your timeline
• New and value-added applications work with and add significant business value to other Oracle Applications
• Flexible deployment options including on-premise, public clouds, private clouds and software as a service (SaaS)

Application and Process Leadership: Best-of-the-Best Combination

• Processes based on a best-of-the-best combination of Oracle E-Business Suite and Oracle’s PeopleSoft, Primavera, JD Edwards, and Siebel applications
• Based on customer input and innovation covering all areas of business and industry requirements

Source – Oracle Fusion Apps Official Website

Original Source – Lights, Camera, Doodle!!

I just sent out an invitation on Linkedin. Look at the Friend recommendations it displayed !

Click to expand - Linkedin April Fool trick

Linkedin’s April Fool trick is it ??

Nitin Jain