Oracle Streamlines the Path to Its Sales Cloud

Oracle is, once again, furthering its investments in the cloud. The company released its Oracle Accelerate for Oracle Sales Cloud, which consists of solutions for partners to help midsized businesses quickly and cost-effectively migrate legacy CRM applications to an advanced cloud platform.

Organizations must respond more frequently than ever to changing customer relationships. This includes the ways in which salespeople access the growing amounts of unstructured data. "I don't think I know of a single company tha's not taking notice of what's going on in the market today," says Steve Cox, vice president of midsize applications at Oracle. "Customers are changing, whether they are a business-to-business organization or whether they're a business-to-consumer organization or whether they're in the public sector."

Oracle aims to help organizations adapt to the changing business environment and enable companies to increase sales and optimize processes with its Oracle Sales Cloud. The Oracle Sales Cloud helps sales reps learn more and sell more to prospects and customers through lead qualification technologies, mobile capabilities, and collaborative solutions. It also integrates to other Oracle CX Cloud solutions, including the company's Marketing Cloud, Social Cloud, Service Cloud, and Configure, Price, and Quote Cloud. According to Oracle, these applications "empower organizations to improve experiences, enhance loyalty, differentiate their brands, and drive measurable results by creating consistent, connected, and personalized brand experiences across all channels and devices."

Oracle Accelerate makes the process of installation quicker for third-party partners. Already, 16 Oracle partners, including Hitachi Consulting, BPI OnDemand, and Enigen UK, offer Oracle Accelerate for Oracle Sales Cloud. More partners are expected to offer the solution over the coming months.

While Oracle had initially been slow to offer cloud solutions, it has been making a push in recent years to bolster its cloud offerings. At its OpenWorld conference in September, the company touted the significant growth of its cloud solutions, positioning the company as the number-two provider of hosted applications, behind Salesforce.com.

"The fact that [Oracle] now has stable products and market outreach is a sign of the maturation of the new [product] line and of the market in general," Denis Pombriant, founder and managing principal at Beagle Research, says.

Since Oracle is in a quiet period, executives weren't able to comment on the sales implications of the announcement or its potential benefits to new customers looking to make the transition. Neither could they expand on results that existing customers have experienced.

Pombriant says that customers with legacy accounts with companies that were later bought out by Oracle, such as Siebel or PeopleSoft, are likely to see a painless transition if Oracle's past practices are any indication. "Oracle has a good history of upgrading within a product line without additional fees. [The company] has done something hard in building the products and the program and some people said it would never happen. The devil's always in the details, but you have to credit them for doing the right things. They have a lot of people highly committed to the products and their customers. Let's see how it all rolls out."

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