After a few days, let's see if I remember what I was going to write about. So I've talked about the switch side and the application side of call center products. Where does Oracle fit into this market? First let's look at what I consider to be Oracle's four main profit centers, from what I've been able to gather by osmosis at my stay there.

Biggest division is server technologies. The guys that write the database software in C (or C++) and the other "database level" technologies like Java support (called Aurora? Or was that another project. Too many code names). A great big chunk of our revenue comes from direct sales of database licenses. Unfortunately not the biggest profit center because a great big chunk of people costs is also spent here.

Our biggest profit center is actually consultation. Dollar for dollar we make more revenue per dollar spent than the other three divisions. This is probably true for just about any company, which makes you realize why so much business software is not easy to use. Well, business software is very complicated, but we could make it quite a bit easier to use if we wanted to spend a considerable effort into making it that way.

Enterprise Resource Management is the elder of the two applications divisions. ERP covers Human Resources, Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivable, and a host of other business apps. Basically any application where the user doesn't directly interface with a customer is under the purview of ERP. And although in AP and AR applications you can have agents talking to customers, those agents are also more highly trained than standard customer interfacing agents, and in general talking to customers is not their primary job function.

This leaves applications where agents primarily spend their time talking to customers. The Customer Relationship Management division is responsible for these apps, which range from Customer Support to Collections to Telesales. CRM is the newest division, only a couple of years old. Although it is actually making revenue, expenses still outweigh our revenues, so we're the only major profit sink in Oracle. On the other hand, CRM has the greatest growth potential for the next few years at least.

Other than our kick-ass database and relatively competent consulting arm, Oracle's divisions manage to put out competitive but not awe-inspiring products. Point for point, ERP applications sometimes are better than the competition, but usually have less features. Same applies to CRM applications only moreso. How do we then keep selling our ERP and CRM solutions? Three factors: a great and aggressive sales arm (by aggressive I mean they lie to make a sale), a wide range of products that cover a huge number of applications, and a tight integration among those products.

What does this mean? It means a business can pretty much stick with Oracle products to run their business. Consistent user interface, no integration hassles and easier support, and knowing that the company whose products you're using is going to be around for a long while. It's easier to train on and there are lots of Oracle professionals in the job market. The natural interoperability we build into our products is a great advantage. No one else has products that span ERP and CRM spaces, so that means businesses that use those products have to write their own interoperability to other products that fill in the gaps. That integration will never be as tight as what we offer (note that this is the same kind of tactics Microsoft uses to gain market dominance, without the practice of subverting standards or making sure other products don't work with our OS -- or database in this case).

So that's what Oracle provides in the call center space. Not best of class products, although in most applications competitive and sometimes 2nd or 3rd best. But our call center products interoperate with everything else we put out and there is a consistent user interface and tech stack. I think we have products that are easier to install and maintain than our competitors. That may not mean much to the end user, but for a business that buys another package and spends lots of money getting it to work with everything else and not have it work in the end, it's important. Sort of the difference between business software and consumer software.