Oracle (News - Alert) has announced the availability of Oracle's Siebel CRM On Demand Partner Subscription option. The Siebellians say it's designed for more effective collaboration with third parties and to improve the partner network.

Through a limited use license, the subscription option lets companies share information with their partners to "streamline joint sales, marketing and service activities," company officials say: "Partners can access a subset of core Siebel CRM On Demand features," such as leads, services requests, analytics, what have you. "All customer information is centralized, accessible and secure."

Oracle Senior Vice President of CRM Anthony Lye said the option is basically "giving our customers the ability to integrate better with their partner channels."

About a month ago the firm announced Siebel CRM Mobile for the BlackBerry (News - Alert) platform. Created from a collaboration between Oracle and Research In Motion, Siebel CRM Mobile has what Siebel officials described at the time as "secure mobile CRM functionality that mirrors the simplicity of the BlackBerry e-mail experience."

This offering is available to existing Siebel Wireless customers and uses the open development platform provided by the BlackBerry Mobile Data System to simplify integration with Web services used by Siebel CRM.

The product lets users access Siebel CRM applications from BlackBerry smartphones and use the mobile functions of the push-based BlackBerry system architecture. It lets users access CRM data online or offline.

Enterprises can already wirelessly access Siebel CRM through the BlackBerry Browser, and "Siebel CRM Mobile goes further," company officials say, "by providing an additional level of integration with the BlackBerry platform to make real-time CRM data available to sales forces, executives and field service engineers."

In Decision Matrix: Selecting a CRM Vendor (Competitor Focus), research group Datamonitor evaluated offerings from different CRM players and found that Oracle is "a clear market leader with an impressively versatile and highly competitive CRM portfolio."

"Out of the eleven products profiled, Oracle Siebel CRM emerges as the de-facto standard," the research group found. "Oracle Siebel CRM is a constant presence on the Market Leaders graph, and it is not the market leader or co-leader in only 2 out of 12 categories. Oracle Siebel CRM proves capable of building up a significant lead over its rivals, most notably in analytics and product maturity."

In late August Oracle officials pronounced themselves pleased with Oracle's Siebel CRM On Demand and Oracle On Demand customer traction, announcing that in the last quarter alone Oracle established or expanded its relationship with more than 200 new global customers, including ADP, Central Plastics, Fidelity Registered Investment Advisor Group, GE Commercial Finance and Translational Genomics Research Institute.

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David Sims is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To see more of his articles, please visit his columnist page.

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