news Technology giant Oracle announced yesterday that various top Australian public and private sector entities had implemented its CRM On Demand software as a service suite to upgrade customer service, gain access to real-time analytics, and enable speeding up of adaptive business planning.

CRM On Demand is a subscription-based customer relationship management (CRM) system for service, sales, marketing and contact centre operations. Previously offered only as an offshore-hosted option, CRM On Demand was established by Oracle at an Australian datacentre in November 2010 to offer customers local hosting of their data.

Australia’s public sector establishments and financial institutions have had long-standing concerns with hosting their SaaS application data offshore. Oracle had revealed its plans to offer the CRM On Demand platform as a locally hosted service at Oracle OpenWorld 2010. This made Oracle one of the first multinational software giants to start offering SaaS from an Australian platform, in collaboration with hosting company Harbour MSP. Several other multinational cloud computing technology giants continue to prefer Singapore as the closest option for data hosting. Harbour MSP’s Australian datacentre is located in the huge Global Switch facility in Ultimo, Sydney.

According to a statement issued yesterday by Oracle, local customers who have been provisioned in the local datacentre on the Oracle CRM On Demand platform include the Victorian Department of Human Services, NSW government agency NSW Businesslink, NBN Co, AJ Lucas and Suncorp. In September 2011, Oracle had announced the rollout of the CRM On Demand platform for Telstra Wholesale. Telstra had elaborated then that it had chosen Oracle CRM On Demand because of its easy integration with the company’s existing IT infrastructure, such as Oracle’s Siebel software that helps manage billing for Telstra’s retail customers.

Grahame Coles, CIO, Department of Human Services, Victoria said that Oracle CRM On Demand’s ease of use, flexibility and innovation meets his company’s needs, while providing all the extra advantages of a hosted solution. “Providing the data locally makes the solution more compelling and provides us the ability to expand the footprint into other departmental needs,” Coles said.

Also stressing the platform’s reliability and flexibility, Simon Soon, CIO, AJ Lucas Group Limited said that the solution was implemented rapidly. He stated that the system’s compliance with local regulations also made for “peace of mind when storing data in the cloud”.

Teck Wee Lim, General Manager, CRM Oracle Asia Pacific explained that earlier, local regulations around data sovereignty acted as a hindrance to Oracle’s public and financial sector customers considering cloud computing. “Now we are able to overcome their concerns and meet their specific needs with our commitment to deliver industry-leading cloud computing solutions hosted at a local customer data centre” Lim stated.

The news comes as other major local enterprise software companies such as Salesforce.com, SAP, Microsoft and others have not over the latter half of this year and the first half of this year released the names of many major local customers, with it remaining unclear to what extent challenger firms such as Salesforce.com are having on the local market, against giant incumbents like Oracle.

Image credit: Oracle

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1. Phil
   Posted 17/01/2012 at 7:17 pm | Permalink | Reply

   data sovereignty? … you may want to recheck you facts here. HarbourMSP maybe Australian owned yet Global Switch is foreign owned.

   The data sovereignty issue is at this point in time is fairly untested within legal frameworks with a number of Australian providers who were traditionally bleeting about how they were located within Australian data centres have now stopped bleeting as they are in fact located inside a data centre located in Australia yet that facility is under foreign ownership … Global Switch, Equinix etc

   Until a EU or US court/government attempts to take action against one of these facilities and/or their customers or in fact a customer of a customer’s customer then the data sovereignty issue is very unanswered.

   On the flipside of your article Renai, HarbourMSP act as the provider of Oracle CRM rather than Oracle directly. The reason why HarbourMSP is being pushed recent times re Oracle is that they were the first large outsourcer that was appointed the then hyped ‘Suntone Certified’ status approx a decade ago (perhaps this was before your time)… and as a result of Oracle acquiring Sun Microsystems it inherited the SunTone certified partners such as HarbourMSP and Macquarie Telecom.

   Oracle to the best of my knowledge does not offer Oracle CRM directly to customers in Australia

   • Renai LeMay
     Posted 17/01/2012 at 7:33 pm | Permalink | Reply

     Thanks for your comment Phil; this background has added quite a bit to the article. I’m unsure as to the precise relationship between Oracle and HarbourMSP, but I do know the statement about these customers was issued by Oracle. It is my impression that Oracle directs customers who wants CRM on Demand hosted in Australia to HarbourMSP, then assists with those implementations. If you have further insight into how this functions, I’d be glad to hear more etc.