going to be a journey. What we’re doing is providing customers with value today by prebuilding integrations between our
applications to support a process, and then allowing them
through this architecture to effectively extend it or make
changes to it to support their core business processes.”
In delivering that kind of flexibility while getting the integration monkey off its customers’ backs, Oracle is giving IT
departments exactly what they’re clamoring for.
“People are trying to reduce the cost of integration,” says
Bill Swanton, vice president of research for AMR Research. “A
lot of them just don’t like being in the integration business.
They’d rather somebody else was doing it.”
REAL INTEGRATION BENEFITS
In particular, one of the initial releases—a prebuilt integration
between Oracle CRM On Demand (formerly Siebel CRM
On Demand) and Oracle E-Business
Suite—has proven to be just the tonic
Dominic Martinelli was looking for. As
vice president of IT for Rackable Systems,
a leading provider of build-to-order
server and storage products for large-scale
data center customers including Amazon.
com, Microsoft, and Yahoo!, Martinelli
was saddled with a customer relationship
management (CRM) system that wasn’t
connected to the company’s existing
Oracle E-Business Suite deployment.
Consequently, it wasn’t widely adopted
because salespeople couldn’t easily access
information such as customer orders and account data stored
in Oracle E-Business Suite. Likewise, in order to get potential
sales opportunities into the Oracle E-Business Suite quoting
tool and product configurator, salespeople often had to
manually re-enter all the customer information.
When Rackable Systems went looking for a new CRM
system, Martinelli’s No. 1 requirement was the ability to
address those challenges. He was charged with ensuring that
customer information flowed back and forth seamlessly, so
that new leads entered in the CRM system would show up
in Oracle E-Business Suite and salespeople could access data
from existing customer accounts that was stored in one of the
Oracle E-Business Suite modules. Once Martinelli got word
that Oracle was preparing to introduce Oracle Application
Integration Architecture, Oracle CRM On Demand emerged as
the logical choice.
“We needed to deploy a CRM solution that would be very
easy to use, very easy to maintain, and easy to customize
by the business users, but one that would also be fully integrated with Oracle E-Business Suite,” says Martinelli. “Oracle
Application Integration Architecture was the product that
would allow us to do that.”
That scenario—in which a customer selects an Oracle application on the promise of easily integrating it with other Oracle
products—speaks volumes about the value of Oracle’s integration strategy, says AMR’s Swanton.
“That’s really the big benefit from Oracle Application
Integration Architecture initially,” Swanton says. “Customers
can say, ‘I can buy these additional capabilities with some very
good best-in-class applications, and I can buy prepackaged
integration between them. I know they’ll work, and I can hold
a single vendor responsible for making them work.’”
Eight weeks after selecting Siebel CRM On Demand,
Rackable Systems had its global sales force up and running
on the new application with full end-user adoption within
a quarter. It wasn’t long before Martinelli identified the processes that would be aided by the planned integration with
Oracle E-Business Suite. Chief among these was the sales and
marketing teams’ desire for an improved
ability to track leads and manage oppor-
tunities, as well as to achieve that sought-
after link with Oracle E-Business Suite’s
quoting and configuration tools.
To Martinelli’s satisfaction, the deployment team—which consisted of one
Rackable Systems IT engineer working
full time, one sales tool manager working
full time, one database administrator
working part time, and a small group
from Oracle partner Intelenex—was able
to achieve about 80 percent of the desired
integration with the process integration
pack’s out-of-the-box functionality.
“We were way ahead of the game just by rolling out this
solution because we’re starting at that 80 percent mark rather
than at zero in determining what can be done,” Martinelli says.
>>SNAPSHOT
Rackable Systems
www.rackable.com
Founded: 1999
Headquarters: Fremont, California
Oracle products and services:
Oracle E-Business Suite, Oracle
CRM On Demand, Oracle Database
Other services: Consulting
services from Intelenex
POSTINTEGRATION ROI
The benefits to Rackable Systems were apparent as soon as the
integration was in place. Customer information began flowing
seamlessly between Oracle CRM On Demand and Oracle
E-Business Suite, and the sales staff was able to manage and
access all required information through a Web interface.
“They’re getting the visibility that they’ve been demanding,
but in a format that’s very simple for them,” says Martinelli.
“In the past, they had to jump through a few hoops to get to
it, so it would result in a lot of extra work tracking down the
data our sales professionals needed.”
The impact of Rackable Systems’ integration is visible in
a number of optimized processes. For example, the system
used by salespeople to manage accounts, leads, contacts, and
opportunities connects to Oracle E-Business Suite to check
against existing account information to prevent duplication of
data. Salespeople can also launch the Oracle E-Business Suite
