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Strategies & Market Trends : Gorilla Game Investing in the eWorld -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Boplicity who wrote (1717)	3/28/2000 12:09:00 PM
From: Mike Buckley	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1817

Greg, [Oracle] also announced that many of its customers are choosing Oracle for its integrated CRM and ERP product line that addresses the entire demand and supply chain, rather than "point solutions" that only address small pieces of a company's business processes. I think you're right about the B2C space but I think too much is being made of it. Ever since the ERP players began setting their sites on the CRM space, the primary advantage they offer to potential customers is that they can be a one-stop shop. Without that singular advantage, their less robust CRM applications would have little value compared to the specialists' products. To demonstrate that it's easy to make too much of it, maybe we should count the number of times Oracle issues a press release discussing the quarterly growth of their CRM product. Most companies mention that once in their quarterly report but Oracle uses more of an advertising approach to press releases than most companies. They repeat ad nauseum the same so-called data and use phrases such as "topped the charts." If I was going to get really nit-picky, I'd have to ask, "Which charts?" If you examine Siebel's revenue, you'll see that Siebel's growth exceeded that 179% growth in every year from 1995 to 1998. In the context that Oracle is clearly not topping the charts as they say they are, it does lead one to question if they are truly penetrating the B2C business as much as they would have us believe. --Mike Buckley