Oracle confirms further delays to CRM suite

Oracle's full customer relationship management (CRM) suite will not be available until the end of the year, several months later than the vendor had told customers.

The company confirmed this week that the Telesales module, a key component of the suite, would be delivered later than the rest of the suite, which is due by the end of May. The delay comes as customer demand for CRM functionality is booming.

Oracle's CRM suite has now been delayed eight months from an originally scheduled release last September. Just last week Rick Powles, director of Oracle UK's CRM unit, said the full suite would be delivered by the end of May.

Oracle was keen to play down the delay, saying that only two products - Oracle Telesales and Oracle Web Sales - out of a 63-module suite would be subject to further delay. Telesales is part of the call centre selling application and Web Sales is a new web-based sales force automation application.

Analysts and vendors alike have been critical of Oracle's failure to deliver on its promise. This is despite Mark Jarvis, head of Oracle's marketing, criticising rival Siebel for only having "mobile sales force automation - that's it," at Oracle's Applications User Group conference held last April in San Diego.

Erin Kinikin, research director for CRM at analyst Giga Information Group, said: "The two modules [Oracle Telesales and Oracle Web Sales] will be a controlled release, subject to installation restrictions and additional handholding."

Giga's Kinikin said Oracle plans to concurrently release industry-specific CRM applications including banking and telecoms with the main product releases. "Oracle will not deliver a robust enterprise CRM suite until the end of 2000," she said, adding that customers should "proceed with caution."

From Oracle's perspective, the 11i CRM release is a critical part of its application sales drive because. Mark Jarvis, Oracle's senior vice president of marketing, said: "The world has changed from requiring as much ERP. It's CRM that's needed."

Last month, Meta Group analyst Doug Lynn said Oracle's difficulties stem from its stated objective to achieve a fully web-architected suite of applications; this requires Oracle to rebuild its entire applications suite. But Oracle's approach presents significant potential difficulty for customers.

"Oracle's web architecture and database-centric architecture, for example excessive use of stored procedures, ensure 'big bang' upgrades. These are problematic to accurately cost-estimate and require risk mitigation measures similar to initial deployment projects," said Lynn.

Mike Schmitt, head of JD Edwards' newly formed B2B group, said: "I'm in the game with product at referenceable sites. Larry isn't playing fair."

Giga's Kinikin said the delay could hamper customers. "Business-to-business companies will have great difficulty establishing customer relationships without a way to sell products and manage accounts."