Oracle Completes Flagship Product Line

Oracle unveiled a handful of business-intelligence applications, snapping in place the last piece of its flagship Oracle Applications Release 11i. Oracle Business Intelligence, announced today, consists of four applications that analyze both customer data and the processes set up to interact with customers.

- Marketing Intelligence will analyze the success of marketing campaigns, helping businesses determine what factors lead to customer response and which campaigns are profitable and useful. It will be available with Oracle Marketing.

- Sales Intelligence determines how successful individual representatives and territories are, and it can use that information to do things such as organizing sales territories.

- Call-Center Intelligence analyzes data for peak call-center times so businesses are staffed for the traffic they receive.

- Oracle Customer Intelligence, which was previously announced, analyzes customer data for customer profitability.

Analysts say that analysis is critical to customer-relationship management efforts. "Organizations that don't embrace analytical CRM are going to fail in their CRM projects," says Steve Bonadio, an analyst at Meta Group. But "traditional CRM vendors have been slow to embrace analytical CRM." Bonadio says Oracle's analysis-product plans are ambitious and backed by the company's strengths in databases and data warehouses, which may give it an edge over rivals Siebel Systems Inc. and Clarify Inc.

Oracle Business Intelligence is the final component of Oracle 11i, which executives say will roll out May 18. The application had slipped several months, primarily to fit in new CRM functions. Pricing will be unveiled then.