The two companies will put more than 20,000 people to work flogging CRM solutions, linked and supposedly empowered by Oracle's own CRM package. No matter how CRM remakes the art of selling just about everything, old-fashioned relationships between people are still a crucial factor in moving technology.
People remember the entertainment value as well as the product specs.
Fla. Michael Rocha, senior vice president at Oracle's platform technologies division, says sales representatives are most potent when a product is still largely unfamiliar to potential users. Consulting services around CRM are expected to be a multiple of three or four times the software number, with hardware sales perhaps twice those of software. Leveraging the different strengths of the two companies and the two sales forces is supposed to be what CRM brings to the party, by allowing for the distributed group to share information. The real benefits may accrue to HP, which gets equal footing with rival Sun Microsystems in Oracle's development plans and, perhaps most important, demonstrates a clear change in personality under new boss Carly Fiorena. Not in the negative things, but in the willingness to be aggressive and fast to move.