Oracle Business Online applications, sold through Oracle sales reps as packages that include training and support, can be delivered in as little as five days if they do not include custom components, Oracle said.
Many IT departments are so eager to cut the budgets they allocate to Oracle and the other two, that they are increasingly willing to withstand the fear, uncertainty, and doubt that Oracle sales people try to induce in their customers when they think of switching to a less expensive supplier.
Another key differentiator: are you going into an organization like Oracle, where sales calls the shots?
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The stakes are high: Support and software updates account for roughly half of Oracle's sales.
By contrast, the move to web sales has already saved Oracle tens of millions of dollars in sales and processing time, contributing to its record revenues and margins in recent quarters.
The analyst focused on how Hurd has already made a decisive impact at Oracle by focusing on sales force productivity and execution.
"This took a lot of software development and a lot of business development, " says Chief Executive Doug Renert , who formerly headed application sales at Oracle.
"This took a lot of software development and a lot of business development, " says Chief Executive Doug Renert , who formerly headed application sales at Oracle (nasdaq: ORCL - news - people ).
Oracle is moving to boost sales by hiring more salespeople with specialized industry knowledge, and revamping its customer advocacy groups to learn about product problems faster.
Initially, says George Roberts, the head of Oracle's North American sales division, sales reps were horrified to have pricing, one of their most powerful tools, wrenched from their grasp.
RightNow gets the big-company marketing, professional services, sales reach of Oracle to grow beyond their current run-rate, and to compete more effectively with SalesForce, Microsoft and to a lesser degree, SAP.
Tom learned to harness his natural aggression as a sales vice president at Oracle.
No other vendor is offering as much functionality in one place (Oracle sells ERP, HCM, Sales and Marketing, now social and soon platform).
Since then, the salesforce has been reorganised, with the loss of 4, 000 jobs in the past year, and many sales have moved to Oracle's website, where new standardised pricing has replaced time-wasting negotiation.
Over the next year, Oracle plans to shift 80% of its sales to the web.
Oracle mushroomed in the client-server business, with sales executives sometimes throwing free developer databases from helicopters to crowds of independent allies.
Oracle also said that it added over 1, 700 sales people on a net basis in the first quarter of the fiscal year.
Vinny Smith started out at Oracle, the baby of billionaire Larry Ellison, working in sales under Tom Siebel, also now a billionaire.
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But when he started Siebel Systems in 1993, he applied an Oracle tactic in reverse: to make the customer, not sales quotas, the center of the world.
Every Oracle CloudWorld event features tracks for the cloud can be used in Sales, Customer Service and Support, Finance and Operations, HR, and Applications Development.
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At 21 Benioff joined Oracle as the only guy answering the company's then new 1-800 sales number.
RightNow goes for 4.3 times sales, below multiples of 5.5 and 7.5 for Oracle and Salesforce.com (nyse: CRM - news - people ), respectively.
But suddenly, in 1990, came a resounding crash--which surprised Wall Street but not Oracle customers who had grown weary of premature products pushed on them by an electrified sales force.
If H-P is about pinching pennies, then Oracle is about orchestrating and sustaining the vast, and vastly expensive, marketing and sales efforts necessary to keep an A-list roster of corporate clients in line.
Oracle applications are the applications used by enterprises for employing cost-cutting mechanisms and increasing sales.
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Our turf was sales force automation tools, and in that marketplace we not only stood up to Oracle, we beat them.
Tom Siebel, a star Oracle salesman, left in 1990 to found Siebel Systems when Ellison rejected his idea for a sales-force product.
Oracle also announced plans to launch 4 new hardware products by Sun, which will help it drive sales of its database and middleware software, which is optimized for the new SPARC super clusters.
Oracle's other president, company veteran Safra Catz , is tasked with Oracle's internal operations, so costs don't spiral up in a world of smaller deals and tougher sales.
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