And you can see why: strategic direction is essential for sales effectiveness, and sales knowledge of actual customer behavior is essential for ongoing strategic relevance.

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Oracle has many overlapping and competing assets for CRM and customer service as well as for point solutions (ex email, chat, knowledge management).

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In the early 1990s they had devised a way for businesses and other organizations to measure nonfinancial performance--customer perception, for example, or a company's ability to foster knowledge within its work force--and measure talent it wanted to keep or promote.

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What the customer wants is a supplier who understands their business and for the development teams to apply their knowledge to the work they deliver.

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The amount of domain knowledge about the business and the legacy systems that is embedded in the software developers is what the customer pays for and not really the technology fixes that get delivered through the year.

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