Enterprise Apps Weds Web 2.0 ...

Oracle has announced its new product ... Social CRM. When i read this, my first reaction was ... maybe this is just something about marketing. You know, how a lot of vendors are putting the magic 2 after their product names, and believe that they have come up with a market-capturing product.

And then, i read the details. And, they are quite interesting. As of now, there are three modules which they are launching (are there going to be more?) ... Oracle Sales Prospector, Oracle Sales Campaigns, and Oracle Sales Library.

Oracle Sales Prospector seems to be a tool which is combining some of the business intelligence aspects of enterprise applications, and building in the collaboration aspect to provide a solution, which seems to be quite an interesting one. However, i would have liked to see more of the social networking aspects (or maybe they are there, but i am missing something). There seems to be some amount of networking here, but there could have been more. This reminded me of a demo i had seen some time back, of Lotus Connections, and  it would be quite interesting to see some of those capabilities integrated with this application.

Oracle Sales Campaigns is the application which i havent been able to understand much, so i guess i will wait for more material to be available, before writing about it.

Oracle Sales Library seems to be the new-look content system, which can be used to manage collateral, along with some of the collaborative aspects like tagging, reviews, etc. This seems to be an interesting application, because this seems to be able to enable sales people to leverage the inputs of others on collateral which they are going to use when trying to close a deal. This could be used well with the Oracle Sales Campaign, and  the Oracle Sales Prospector applications.

Taking this one step further, it would be useful to have recommendations from Oracle Sales Library in the Oracle Sales Prospector application, as well as integration with Oracle Sales Campaigns, to enable sales people to pull out content from either application, based on their requirements, and to review comments, tags, ratings, and more importantly, it would be nice to see a recommendation engine, which could use tags to recommend content to users.

I guess having been a Consultant, its a natural instinct to go into solution mode ... but then, these are solutions, arent they? So, heres to the wedding ... when's the reception?