Oracle unveiled the latest version of its CRM software this week, the PeopleSoft Enterprise Customer Relationship Management 9. The enhancements come as part of Oracle’s “Applications Unlimited” program, adding features aimed at attracting the financial and communications industry sectors.
The company says that the move to Internet Protocol (IP) services and 3G data networks has built a need for communications service providers to be more flexible in how they handle their customer and order management processes. The PeopleSoft offering aims to help lower the cost of service and time to market for new products.
Among the offerings is also support for wireless markets, mobile number portability, and lost or stolen wireless handsets.
Adding to Oracle‘s core CRM suite and to the financial services capabilities, the release includes sample processes for Financial Account Creation, Lead and Referral Management, as well as Web Services for Remote Portlets (WSRP) allowing for content currently available within the PeopleSoft portal to be visible by a third party portal.
Some of the PeopleSoft Enterprise CRM 9 enhancements include an actionable 360-degree view of customers with a work list and auto-save of recent searches, an auto- population of commonly typed text using hotkeys, and a bulk service management for order capture, calendaring enhancements, lead import performance improvements, and mobile sales support for Intellisync Mobile Suite (IMS) architecture.
“As with the other product releases within PeopleSoft Enterprise 9, PeopleSoft Enterprise CRM 9 incorporates customers’ requests for improved usability,” said Oracle Vice President of PeopleSoft Enterprise Application Strategy John Webb. “The release includes standards-based technology to ensure our customers may derive continued value from their technology investments without surrendering the IT agility required to capture new opportunities as they arise.”
The new functionalities are intended to improve usability and productivity by streamlining processes through reduced clicks and page transfers. The release is a boon to DePaul University’s productivity, says DePaul’s CRM Craft Team leader Audrey Bledsoe.
“PeopleSoft CRM 9.0 will alleviate the need for several of the DePaul specific customizations and integration points we’ve developed in our CRM 8.9 environment. We are looking for ways to decrease maintenance time.”
Oracle provided this list of enhancements for integration and reporting:
Expanded Web Services — 19 new web service enabled transactions with over 70 service operations for easier integration with third party applications and plug into standards-based business processes
Oracle XML Publisher has been integrated specifically with PeopleSoft Enterprise CRM 9 for improved performance for generating documents, scalability; ability to create correspondence letter templates and real-time merge capabilities and preview of correspondence management.
Oracle BPEL Process Manager integrates Oracle BPEL Process Manager for a standards based business process management tool for organizations to quickly and cost effectively deploy new solutions and business processes across heterogeneous systems; and
Oracle Database 10g and Oracle Application Server 10g Certification
