Oracle Corp. has made one more stride into the wireless space.
The Redwood Shores, Calif.-based software vendor announced what it called its e-Business Suite, which will allow users of handheld devices to access a garden variety of applications and bring them closer to next-generation technologies.
“Our aim is to provide our customers with the ability to increase productivity of employees, customer services and relationship with partners and suppliers,” said Paige O’Neill, Oracle’s director of product marketing.
She said the new software targets three aspects of business, which include customer relationship management, finance and supply chain.
In the CRM space, the software will cover field sales, field service and customer intelligence activities. The finance solution will cover transactions, while the supply chain will cover inventory activities and warehouse management. The devices involved are Palms, Web-enabled phones, smart phones and other personal digital assistants.
In achieving these goals, the company is teaming up with other vendors like Compaq Corp., Palm Inc. and Motorola Inc. “to deliver solutions for the mobile enterprise that encompass everything customers need to get up and running, including software, hardware, devices and consulting services.”
The software also will offer asset management, receivables, time management and vertical applications for the health care and pharmaceutical industries. They will be rolled out next year.
On CRM, Oracle says that the Kyocera QCP 6035 smart phone is already compliant with this slew of applications.
With Compaq, which is a member of the Oracle Partner Program and Mobile Partner Initiative, Oracle aims to use its Oracle9i application server with Compaq Proliant service at the back end to provide mobile access to key applications.
“Compaq’s professional services and Oracle Consulting are doing the implementation for existing CRM customers for as quickly as 15 days,” said O’Neill.
She said Palm has joined the Oracle Partner Program in working with optimizing applications for the Palm operating system and to roll out a number of other solutions. More announcements are in the offing, she hinted.
“We will work together to build and deploy mobile applications with our respective technologies,” she explained. “The idea is to make customers configure the tools themselves to deploy applications.”
Along with Motorola, O’Neill said Nokia Corp., Hewlett-Packard Co. and L.M. Ericsson are working with Oracle on its products.
