Discussion of the Oracle Global Executive Survey

A couple of weeks ago I got a survey from Oracle where you rated several divisions of the company separated (Support, Consulting, Education, Sales, etc). I filled it and this morning I found an invitation in my Inbox from Keith Block (Oracle Executive Vice President) thanking me for filling the survey and inviting me for a conference call at 11am today where he was going to to talk about the result of the survey and what Oracle plans to do.

They received 7000 surveys, Keith invited several of the managers from the different organizations for them to explain what are they doing with the results of it on each area. Below are outlines the main points per organization.

Support

- They improve and use more the collaboration tool and offer a more personalized support experience.

- They are encouraging customers to use their configuration manager feature.

- They are building support capabilities inside the product in order to have proactive diagnostic.

Development

Here they focused only in application development.

- Lifetime support policy for the applications.
- They are working so you can monitor all your different application from Grid Control.
- They are working on having a common reporting tool for all your applications.
- They are focusing in tasks that aim to reduce the cost of ownership of their customers.
- They are architecting the integration between the different applications, the idea is for the
delivery of this to be a prepackaged integration product.
- They spoke about the Oracle Fusion application and how they expect it to be a plug-in to any existing application you may have.

Relationships

Apparently several customers have complained because they have to deal with many different Oracle reps for the different technologies, Keith acknowledged the issue and explained that there are several sales models, but they opted for having several reps with deep knowledge about the technology they represent. Keith explained that Oracle have a huge portfolio of products and it is impossible for a single person to get to know well all of them. Keith vision is that the sales reps would become trusted advisers inside the customer organization.