 |
| | | | | | | | | | | |
Products and Prices Oracle's CRM OnDemand is offered in two different hosting delivery options. The CRM solution was designed to be hosted and delivered as a shared services, multi-tenant database configuration, which means that multiple companies will share the same database, servers, and network connectivity. More recently, Oracle has begun to offer an isolated tenancy model, which provides separate and distinct database environments for each customer, for those customers which prefer or demand greater data segregation for privacy and security purposes (which is common with industries such as government and financial services as well as larger enterprise customers). The multi-tenant hosting service has a list price of approximately $70 USD per user per month. Oracle generally discounts this price based on volume of seats and the 'status' of the customer. For example, Oracle often uses discounts to acquire customers with marquee names. Our experience and research suggests that, like many other publicly traded software manufacturers, the end of a fiscal quarter and the fiscal year end are by far the best time to negotiate software procurements with Oracle as the software giant is highly focused on each period's earnings. While Oracle has a history of discounting its traditional on-premise software solutions by 50% and more, the software as a service CRM solution simply does not offer the same margin for those types of aggressive discounts. Realistically, the SaaS CRM price is seldom discounted below $60 per user per month, and that concession often comes with the requirement of a multiple year subscription contract. Oracle's subscription pricing is on par with other CRM providers for sales force automation (SFA) functionality only. Recognizing that SFA is CRM OnDemand’s strong suit, this is an affordable option as long as marketing and customer service functionality are not essential to your CRM deployment. For enterprises that demand more autonomous security and greater performance of a dedicated environment, Oracle's CRM OnDemand is offered as an isolated tenancy hosting option however the advantages of this deployment method come at a steep price. The isolated tenancy hosting option adds approximately $55 USD per user per month to bring the total list price to an hefty $120 USD per user per month. This pricing premium is aimed at competing with the majority of SaaS CRM providers that do not offer this more secure option. For example, Salesforce.com, a recognized industry leader in SaaS CRM, does not offer this option. However, as a comparison point, other SaaS CRM solutions with similar feature sets and which also offer isolated tenancy include SAP (price unknown at the time of this writing as SaaS product is yet to be delivered) and Aplicor ($89 per user per month). While isolated tenancy appeals to larger firms, the incremental investment with no real gain in functionality, result in a much more costly solution. If you are unsure whether a hosted solution or on premise solution is right for your organization, you are not alone. Oracle’s own sales teams seem to struggle in positioning the on premise CRM products versus the on demand systems. This difficulty, coupled with Oracle’s larger issues of rationalizing the myriad of industry players that Oracle has acquired (PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, Siebel, Vantive, etc.), leaves little doubt why many of Oracle’s customers and prospects have redubbed their Fusion vision as 'Confusion' (a term first coined by competitor Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff). As one might predict from a traditional software company not anxious to cannibalize its flagship products and bulk of the company's revenue stream, Oracle is not known to promote the SaaS CRM model as quickly as it may propose the (much more costly) on premise solutions. In many ways, Oracle's CRM OnDemand is viewed as a defensive play aimed at slowing the attrition of Oracle enterprise customers migrating to SaaS solutions. Ideally, Oracle seems to prefer clients procuring and operating on premise CRM but will offer the on demand solution in order to keep customers from adopting another vendor’s product. We’ve heard of more than one large firm that has followed this path, only to convert to the on premise version or to another vendor’s product when the shortcomings of CRM OnDemand became evident.
|
||||||||||||
