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Understanding Oracle application integration

Understanding Oracle application integration

By  William Band, Vice President and Principal Analyst, Forrester Research 

SearchCRM.com

What do you think of Oracle's new integration module for integrating CRM On Demand and Siebel CRM? We currently run Siebel CRM on-premise and have been considering Salesforce.com CRM On Demand – but would the Oracle product with the integration module be a better option for us?
Oracle offers three deployment options for CRM applications: hosted (Oracle On Demand for Siebel CRM), on premise (Siebel CRM) and Software as a Service (SaaS) (CRM On Demand). Siebel CRM and the hosted version (Oracle On Demand for Siebel CRM) have the identical code base. SaaS and hosted deployments are run out of Oracle's Austin Data Center. The foundation of on-demand and on-premise products are the same, however, the Siebel on-premise product offers more functionality than CRM On Demand. CRM On Demand has similar capabilities but a different user interface (UI), which has been optimized for the SaaS delivery model. The underlying product code between deployment options is the same.

Through Oracle's Application Integration Architecture, customers are able to integrate Siebel CRM and Siebel CRM On Demand through pre-built process integration packs (PIPs) to enable business processes such as "Opportunity to Quote" and "Order to Cash" (O2C). Oracle has several customers that have deployed Siebel CRM on-premise and CRM On Demand in an integrated fashion, but the number of customers using Siebel in this manner is very limited at present.

If you are planning to deploy the solution to disparate user groups (i.e. the Siebel solution on-premise users would be distinct from the CRM On Demand users) then integration packs offer little value. However, if you need to integrate the user populations across common processes, then the integration packs may be attractive. However, in this scenario, the user populations would be using CRM solutions with different UIs, even though they are from the same vendor.