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			Business Research: Contact Center Imperative Research: Performance Improvement Vendor Research: AIM Technology, Aspect, BMC Remedy, Cisco Systems, Enkata, Envision, Five9, Genesys Telecommunications Lab, HardMetrics, Inova Solutions, Jacada, KnoahSoft, Merced Systems, Mercom Systems, Microsoft, NICE Systems, Nortel, Onyx, Oracle, Par3 Communications, Quality Plus, RightNow, Salesforce.com, SAP, Syntellect, Verint, Witness Systems
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Since Oracle Corp. took over PeopleSoft, JD Edwards and Siebel Systems, many customers and prospects have been struggling to understand Oracle’s strategy for customer relationship management (CRM). Meanwhile, to further enhance (or complicate) its strategy for contact centers, in June 2006 Oracle announced the purchase of Telephony@work, saying this would enable it to “become the first CRM applications provider, whether hosted as a service or licensed on premises, to unify contact center technology and CRM software.” And not content to stop there, the company recently unveiled Oracle Virtual PBX, a mobile virtual private branch exchange (PBX) for telecommunication services. This becomes a key component of Oracle’s Service Delivery Platform (SDP) and part of its Fusion middleware. SDP is intended to be a standards-based platform on which to develop carrier-grade services. Oracle says that through support for standards such as SIP, SIP Servlets and Parlay/Parlay X, SDP will enable the development of network-centric services and the portability of those services across networks. Among the first releases of the Oracle SDP, the Oracle Virtual PBX is delivered as an operator-hosted PBX service.

While we applaud any advances that will support the integrated contact center, Ventana Research believes that the current complexity of the CRM market will hinder new appliance-level efforts in the call center. Based on our research and client consultations, we conclude that what is key for customers is the availability of customer-focused applications that can manage performance while improving the efficiency of customer processes.