Oracle buys into CRM again

Oracle acquires hosted call-centre firm Telephony@Work

Oracle is pushing further into customer relationship management (CRM) systems by acquiring California-based Telephony@Work.

Telephony@Work’s CallCenterAnywhere is an IP software-based system for both on-demand and on-premise contact centres. The system is currently offered through Siebel’s Contact On Demand service and is also sold to end-user companies and third-party hosting service providers.

"One of the things we realised when we entered the CRM on-demand market is that the hosted CRM vendors were offering partial solutions and not satisfying the needs of call centers,” said Rob Reid, group vice president for CRM On Demand at Oracle, in a statement. “They also required companies to purchase hardware and software to run a world-class contact centre."

Oracle said its aim was to become “the first CRM applications provider, whether hosted as a service or licensed on-premises, to unify contact centre technology and CRM software”.

However that claim could be disputed by RightNow Technologies, which provides hosted and on-premise call-centre CRM service.

RightNow today announced two voice applications that support caller ID and accelerate information about the caller.