Oracle adds single-tenant option to CRM On Demand |
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By Barney Beal, News Director
19 Feb 2008 | SearchCRM.com |
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Oracle Corp. today expanded its Software as a Service (SaaS) CRM application to include a single-tenant version, a move that will offer customers more flexibility and security, according to the company.
The Siebel CRM On Demand Single Tenant, Enterprise Edition provides a dedicated database, middleware and application instance of the CRM product for each customer.
"When Oracle acquired Siebel, we spent 18 months re-architecting the Siebel On Demand product away from a big, multi-tenant offering," said Anthony Lye, senior vice president of CRM On Demand. "As we researched the customer base and our strategy on the Oracle stack, we found an opportunity to offer the same product, the same subscription-based model, but move away from a traditional multi-tenant offering. None of our larger customers wanted multi-tenancy."
Financial services, insurance and healthcare customers, in particular, appreciate the option to deploy an on-demand application with their data stored separately from other customers' data, Lye said. Prior to Oracle's acquisition of Siebel, the application ran in an IBM data center. Since then, Oracle has moved it to its own technology stack at its data center in Austin, Texas, including the Oracle Enterprise Manager, which allows the company to run multiple instances.
The multi-tenant version of Siebel On Demand starts at $75 per user per month, and the Single Tenant, Enterprise Edition at $125 per user per month. Oracle has been offering the product selectively for about seven months, according to Lye. The company doesn't release total customer numbers for the On Demand product, but Lye said about two-thirds of customers are asking for the private edition.
"When you look at industries where there may be regulation, solutions like this make a heck of a lot of sense," said Denis Pombriant, managing principal of Stoughton, Mass.-based Beagle Research. "They're growing the market and meeting a heretofore unappreciated or unaddressed need."
Beyond the security and compliance implications, the multiple instances allow for flexibility in timing maintenance and upgrades, Lye said. But he clearly sees the security of a single instance as a differentiator from multi-tenant competitors like Salesforce.com.
"Everyone's one row from another in the database," he said. "I'd worry people could look across data sets. I would rather give my customers the absolute assurance that the application is on a single database."
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