After acquiring Siebel’s customer relationship management (CRM) solutions, Oracle is amongst the top players in CRM business providing comprehensive and customer centric applications. Many Indian firms today use Oracle’s Siebel CRM On Demand CRM solution to better understand customer. The company feels telecommunication, automotive, retail banking and government-citizen interface will be the top four sectors in buying its CRM products. Anthony Lye, Senior VP, CRM, Oracle Corporation talks to NDTV on Oracle's CRM vision, opportunities in Indian market and growth strategies.
NDTV: What does CRM basically do for a company?
Anthony Lye: At the highest level CRM allows an organization to define in a central location all of the business rules and ways in which the company wants to interact with its customers across multiple channels. CRM is a process or methodology that will help club lots of pieces of information about customers, marketing effectiveness, sales and market trends.
NDTV: Could you tell us what does Oracle see in the CRM market? Also throw more light on the reason why it acquired Siebel and how big a market is it worldwide and India?
Anthony Lye: Oracle recognized that companies like SAP and Oracle have CRM around ERP market. The management at Oracle looked at the fact that Siebel has built all of the functionality around the customer and since there was a shift from product centricity to customer centricity, so it became very apparent for Oracle to acquire best in class CRM product.
Siebel has been the market leader in the CRM space for more than a decade and after acquisition, Oracle became the number one CRM applications company in the world. Over the years Oracle has invested substantially in the Siebel product line growing it manifold. Overall the acquisition has gone incredibly well with business continue to outperform our expectations. The current product line includes Oracle Siebel CRM, for enterprise customers and Oracle Siebel On Demand for the small and mid sized companies.
NDTV: Is CRM an important of part of Oracle’s product portfolio?
Anthony Lye: I am biased to answer this because I think CRM is the most important part of the applications business. It is certainly the area where the companies and customers need to differentiate. Under the Oracle Corporation, CRM is getting more exposure by entering newer geographies and industries that Siebel was unable to enter.
NDTV: Are you looking at India as a big market for CRM?
Anthony Lye: India is a fabulous place for Oracle and it is a significant part of our business. We are providing CRM solutions to top-notch firms like Tata Motors and Tata Sky DTH services who are mounting very aggressive campaigns and strategies to attract and retain customers. We have been very successful both in wireline and wireless space with companies like Airtel using our products. We see India as a very significant part of our overall business.
With more young Indian population start to consume our products, we at Oracle see it as an opportunity to serve the companies that will then serve those customers. We also see an opportunity to provide best in class software to existing incumbents who need to protect and expand upon their own footprint besides selling to for example mobile giant Vodafone, who is a big customer of our solutions.
NDTV: Which sector do you see would be the biggest buyer of your CRM products?
Anthony Lye: Telecommunication is a very significant sector, as you know in the past few years, the number of standards and technologies in the wireless and wirline space have increased considerably. Retail banking, automotive market and government-citizen interface are few other areas, where we see significant business opportunities.
NDTV: BlackBerry is using a lot of your CRM solutions. Can you tell us how it has helped BlackBerry?
Anthony Lye: Oracle Mobile Sales Assistant is a new product that has redefined mobile CRM access for Oracle CRM On Demand customers using the BlackBerry wireless platform. The Mobile Sales Assistant user interface helps sales executives become more efficient with frequently executed tasks. We also see Apple iPhone as a dominant and logical component for us to build on.
NDTV: How much would CRM be contributing to Oracle’s revenues?
Anthony Lye: We don’t break out revenues specifically on any product line but I would like to highlight the number of live active users. We have more than 5 million active users, which is a very significant number and it is larger than all of our competitors combined.
NDTV: There seems to be a slowdown in the US, does that affects your growth in the US market?
Anthony Lye: I don’t think so. I think Oracle’s diverse customer base and presence in so many industries and countries will not affect our CRM business in a significant way. We think that whether a market is good or suffering a bit, the customers are the most critical asset that anyone can have. You may have the best product in the world but if no one buys it then it is of no use.
NDTV: Can you tell us about your growth figures?
Anthony Lye: I don’t want to speculate on futures, which is something I am not very good at. I am responsible for building products at Oracle and making sure that they are the best products that we can build.
NDTV: How fast is Oracle growing in India?
Anthony Lye: In India we are employing more than 20,000 people and the country is a very significant part of our business strategy. We think that people here are very capable, skilled and they provide us with a range of services.
NDTV: Is there any Indian company in the CRM space that you want to partner with?
Anthony Lye: We have a number of partners and the important thing about our business is to provide our customers with the solutions that they expect. It is almost impossible for a single company to do everything so tried to expand on our value proposition by enabling a number of partners. We have a number of consulting partners and independent software vendors who connect to our system.
NDTV: Are you looking at expanding the Indian development center further?
Anthony Lye: Again it is something I would not comment on. We have made a sizeable investment and we are pleased with the results.
NDTV: If you look at the future CRM markets, which will the fastest growing markets?
Anthony Lye: I tend to look from a global perspective more at industries. Obviously the BRICK countries – Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Korea, have very significant potential but at the same time increasing number of players are entering the US market too.