Oracle Ups Ante vs. Salesforce.com with CRM On Demand Refresh

With the economy in a recession, enterprise applications makers are facing increased pressure to provide customers with products that help them conduct business with greater efficiency and even insight.

That's why Oracle has refreshed its applications for helping sales teams boost their ability to close deals. Hoping to trump rival Salesforce.com in SAAS (software as a service) CRM, Oracle Jan. 27 will launch Oracle CRM On Demand Release 16.

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The platform will include new customization tools, new PRM (partner relationship management) utilities and a hosted single-tenant standard edition, challenging Salesforce.com's philosophy that SAAS has to be multitenant.

Multitenant architectures call for customers to share the same application server and database. As an alternative, Oracle is now offering On Demand Single Tenant Standard Edition, a SAAS offering in which customers access a dedicated hardware and software stack instead of sharing the same resources.

he sharing of application infrastructure resources leads to occasional SAAS outages, Oracle Senior Vice President of CRM Anthony Lye told eWEEK.

"The bad thing with multitenancy is when it goes down, you guys write about it on the front page," Lye said. "I don't want to be on the front page for anything bad," he added, alluding to Salesforce.com's recent SAAS outage.

Previously, Oracle offered multitenant SAAS, where everyone got simultaneous upgrades, or On Demand Single Tenant Enterprise Edition, which let customers pick their own maintenance and upgrade window. On Demand Single Tenant Standard Edition sits between those two to offer all the benefits of single tenancy without the configurable maintenance and upgrade windows.

This, Lye believes, will help Oracle stand out next to SAAS leader Salesforce.com. "We're winning deals because we have single tenancy, so we're bringing single tenancy to more and more customers."