Today Oracle announced its new Social Relationship Management (SRM) Platform, an integrated software platform that helps organizations listen, engage, market and monitor their social interactions with all of its constituents across the enterprise (prospects, customers, influencers, partners, candidates and employees.)
Oracle has been engaged in social-enabled business for a while, delivering Oracle Social Network and bringing social collaboration into processes like Fusion HCM via Fusion Network at Work. Today’s announcement takes Oracle well beyond social conversations into a comprehensive platform play. It is leveraging several of its acquisitions from earlier this year (Vitrue, Collective Intellect and Involver) to round out its initial offering in the SRM suite, but the vision for the SRM platform spans the many diverse business processes of the enterprise.
Today, the Oracle SRM suite is comprised of the following:
The two newest additions to the suite are:
Social Engagement and Monitoring, comprised of Oracle’s recent acquisitions of Collective Intellect and Involver, provide a best of breed solution aimed at listening to and engaging in customer in conversations.
Social Marketing, coming from the Vitrue acquisition, marries social channels, content and data with traditional CRM systems to make better decisions around social customer engagement and marketing initiatives.
Beyond Social CRM – Oracle SRM aims for a holistic view of the individual (employees included)
During the launch, Oracle explained its philosophy of “building the lifetime customer experience”. That experience includes concepts such as combining the social understanding of an individual (as a social networker) with the enterprise understanding of that individual (as a customer) to deliver better insights and predictions – for example, not just measuring a customer’s value based on the revenue they bring into the organization, but also on the influence that customer has on revenue through social media.
Oracle envisions extending this holistic insight to the workforce as well.
Within talent acquisition, the new SRM platform will enrich the Taleo recruiting offering to bring monitoring, engagement and even social marketing together with Taleo to bolster talent acquisition and retention endeavors. By helping organizations leverage their internal and external social tools to create seamless environments, Oracle looks to help companies turn their employees into “brand ambassadors” (where they are positively engaged and communicative through social channels to promote the company as a good place to work and/or to do business with).
Beyond recruiting, the profile of the individual – their combined employee profile as well as social profiles – will be leveraged for greater insight and decision support across the enterprise. I believe this holistic employee view is at least 12-18 months away from reality (with Oracle focusing most of its initial efforts on the ‘lifetime customer’ side), but I am nonetheless encouraged to hear Oracle presenting this future vision.
My POV:
The social landscape is highly fragmented, with hundreds of technology vendors servicing the many different aspects of social relationship management. While this fragmentation is providing innovation on all fronts, it is also resulting in a fragmented relationship and incomplete insights with customers, partners, and employees. Oracle’s SRM platform, through acquisition and native development, looks to unify that experience and provide a complete platform for end to end support for any enterprise relationship. With more than 380K clients across the world, and with the market for social technologies growing at close to 60%, the opportunity for Oracle is substantial.
Oracle speaks of close to 1000 clients on its new SRM platform, but almost all of these clients come from the recent Vitrue, Collective Intellect and Involver solutions. Yet the platform presents a good vision for supporting social-enabled business: one fueled by the opportunities externally and internally to drive new insights and results through effective application of emerging disruptive technologies.
The technologies used to address people processes – or HCM considerations – are increasingly coming from non-traditional HCM vendors. A CRM leader, Salesforce.com, is suddenly messaging and delivering in the area of employee engagement and performance. Social task and project management tools are encroaching upon performance and goal management solution providers. Even pure enterprise social networking technologies deliver on the fundamentals of social learning and knowledge management. HR and HR technology leaders will find their areas influenced by these and other emerging tools; staying abreast of the advances in areas like CRM will help these HR leaders envision and plan for their new futures of work.
Filed under: Cloud, ERP, Future of Work, Mobile/Social, Oracle, Social, Talent Management Tagged: Cloud, CRM, future of work, HCM, Oracle, SRM, yvette cameron 