The Asia Pacific region has become something of a hotbed for SaaS. Though India lags behind countries like Australia and Japan when it comes to on-demand services, this gap is shrinking and so it is no surprise that players like Oracle show interest in this region and especially in India. What is different though, is their focus on large enterprises instead of SMBs, the usual target for SaaS providers.One thing that Oracle is betting on to boost its SaaS presence in the future is Fusion Middleware. The company is currently working on creating an underlying platform based on Fusion Middleware, which will pick up the ‘best’ components from across Oracle’s PeopleSoft, Siebel, and JDE line. “This will be offered either on-premise or on-demand to customers will be a very important for piece for Oracle’s on-demand strategy in the future,” said Michel van Woudenberg, director (APAC) for Oracle On Demand CRM.
On the face of it, Oracle’s reasoning is sound. It has a number of large clients, especially in the CRM space due to the acquisitions of JD Edwards & PeopleSoft, and by adopting this strategy they can focus on a segment that they are fairly comfortable with. As van Woudenberg puts it, “Our on-demand offering uses the Siebel on-premise data model as its base. So, it is easier for us to move clients onto SaaS. What it also did for us was make development of applications easier.”Oracle provides three deployment options for its SaaS CRM offering, which include - multi tenant (traditional SaaS offerings), single tenant, and customer. The Oracle CRM On Demand also comes with built-in analytics, data warehousing, and real time reporting. This value addition is what Oracle feels makes its products more attractive to enterprise customers.
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