Down But Not Out, Oracle Eyes CRM

Still, Oracle executives are as confident as ever, and the company actually has a few tricks up its sleeve that point to a brighter future, including a new concentration on CRM. As for Ellison's decision to leave Apple, Oracle officials say its proves their CEO is more committed than ever to his company.

"Larry was a very different CEO five years ago" said John Wookey, senior vice president of application development at Oracle. "Today, he's much smarter and much more focused on Oracle's relationships [with partners."

While IBM's DB2 database has moved up the charts fast and seemingly caught up with Oracle, according to some market share studies, Oracle 9i Database still is one of the most dominant software products in the industry. Following that lead, the company has bolstered the other half of its middleware offering, the Oracle 9i Application Server. Earlier this year, Oracle geared a successful marketing campaign around 9i AS that boosted partner numbers and sales, making Oracle's application server a solid alternative to market leaders IBM and BEA Systems.

Now, Oracle is trying to work the same magic with a new marketing campaign for its CRM technology as it aims to be the undisputed number two player behind Siebel Systems. In addition, Oracle officials are taking the company's vision of CRM to the channel and educating partners. It may be difficult considering that Oracle doesn't have branded CRM suite like Siebel, PeopleSoft and other rivals. Instead, under the Oracle 11i E-Business Suite, there are Oracle sales and marketing products that contain broad solutions for online sales, telesales, PRM and marketing intelligence. Oracle sees its broad, business-process focused approach as an advantage.

"CRM isn't just sales force automation software," said Andrew Kass, vice president of CRM development. "We spent a lot of time figuring out what people want, which is integrated business processes, and we've stopped concentrating on all the different modules and components of the typical CRM suites."

Oracle is also targeting the government and education markets. Oracle has as strong a presence in the growing government market, and California aside, Oracle is trying to further entrench itself in the market with CRM.

"You don't think of the public sector as having customers, but it does," Wookey said. "Federal, state, local governments and education are subjected to the same economic cycles as other commercial sectors."

Oracle is also turning its attention to VARs with vertical industry expertise and concentrations on business processes to increase CRM sales. "We love working with these kinds of partners. We're doing half of our business with partners today," Kass said.

Despite the fact that CRM and software in general is having a terrible year, Wookey said he sees signs of improvement in the industry and is optimistic about CRM as well as Oracle's future. "We think the manufacturing market will be ready to rebound soon," Wookey said "They're beginning to look at applications again and they'll probably start buying early next year."