Steve Elsham, head of CRM applications at Oracle, said that the company had fundamentally reviewed the way it wrote its software after realising that most of the functionality it was putting into applications wasn't being used. 'Around 18 months ago we started to look at improving the effectiveness of our own sales force and we found they were using only about 25% of the functionality,' he said. 'When we then talked to our customers we found much the same thing.  The sales guys felt they weren't getting value from it - they were putting data in but getting nothing back'.

Elsham said the company had decided to 'rearchitecture' its applications, focussing on information flow through a business and the early applications are in sales and field service. 'It has been redesigned around process flows that the sales people go through and so, for example, they would have all they need on one screen and not have to flick through six,' he said.

One area that can benefit from such a joined-up information flow is field service.  'Here the real value comes in getting the information out to the engineers,' he said. 

One of the problems, he acknowledged, was that systems are built by IT people not the system users. 'So we flew out some engineers to California to sit with the developers and say what they wanted from the application.'

These early developments are part of a general restructuring of the Oracle products called Project Fusion. This is designed to bring the different platforms it has developed and acquired (from Peoplesoft and JD Edwards by 2013. 'Those products are still being supported and developed,' he said, 'but they are also being reverse-engineered from a process point of view so where there are strengths such as JD Edwards in the construction industry, that is the template that remains in the solution.'

He said that within that timescale most customers would have expected to replace their systems probably twice so that the long-term plan allows customers to adapt gradually. He added that in this new area, the competition was not so much rival vendors such as Siebel and SAP, but bespoke systems which account for about half of all implementation, he said.