Oracle (ORCL) is one of the companies that leverages Web 2.0 technologies and concepts to improve its products. Sales people often feel that CRM has made them less productive due to time-consuming data entry that takes time from customer-focused activities and prevents them from meeting their targets in a timely fashion. Oracle is infusing its products with Web 2.0 to remove the emphasis from reporting and place it on selling.

Oracle has developed a new breed of social, sales applications designed: to be more intuitive; to model common tasks sales representatives do every day, and leverage the knowledge and wisdom of collaborative-sales communities.

While traditional CRM offerings will continue to be a critical application for automating and optimizing sales operations, Oracle Social CRM Applications are intended for sales users rather than sales executives. They are designed to provide immediate benefits while eliminating some of the time-consuming elements associated with CRM, such as data entry. These tools are seen as keys to improving sales effectiveness by increasing sales through single-focused applications that are designed to be easy to use as well as mash-up and present data from disparate sources in visually-compelling forms. The goal is to solve business challenges and harness collective intelligence across companies or networks comprised of multiple organizations. The company’s Social CRM Applications include:

1. The Oracle Sales Prospector, which delivers a highly-graphical mash-up of internal and external data sources that help sales people to identify their top prospects. The recommendations use sophisticated analytics that identify buying patterns based on purchase history. It not only suggests potential deals for a sales representative to pursue but also the projected revenue, close probability, and time-to-close for each deal predicted.

2. The Oracle Sales Campaigns allows salespeople to create and share HTML e-mail campaigns and then track and measure their effectiveness. The idea is that collaborating on and pooling the best material available for a campaign benefits the entire sales team. It guides representatives to those campaigns that have been most effective in specific scenarios (e.g., initiatives targeted to prospects in a specific industry). In addition, this application reduces the amount of repetitive work that each salesperson normally would undertake in order to conduct his/her individual campaign.

3. The Oracle Sales Library creates a single repository of sales materials to empower users with Web 2.0 tools. Such tools include tagging, rating, and reviewing in order to determine which assets are the most effective. The aim is to empower an individual salesperson to be able to download individual slides or an entire presentation for meetings quickly and easily. Normally, a sales user must download an entire presentation from an internal portal before finding and selecting slides to his or her liking.

4. The Oracle Mobile Sales Assistant is a task-based mobile application that allows sales reps to access critical customer information while on the go.

5. A series of widgets communicate pertinent customer or sales information on the user’s desktop or within the portal of his/her choice. This frees the user from having to open a CRM application in order to access this information.

All these applications are built on Oracle’s standards-based Fusion Middleware platform to facilitate easy integration with other business applications and provide the scalability and security that businesses require.