They’re up to it again!

Oracle continues to confuse people with their insistence on talking about social CRM while they keep on flogging a decidedly “unsocial” (but very profitable) product.

Below is the presentation they prepared to demonstrate their vision and roadmp, but I can highlight the most interesting concepts in just a couple of bullet points:

1. 52% of companies (remember, this is Oracle reporting this) are failing to populate and maintain data.  This means that half of all companies fail to even use the primary function of CRM!
2. “Non-engaged” Employees are “costing companies” 382 Billion dollars in the US alone!  I think “not engaging” in this sense means not providing an application that the employees willingly use!
3. Oracle’s brief history of the internet is represented by an arrow that starts at the beginning and ends yesterday (and gets progressively redder).  I don’t know what it means.  Seriously.
4. “A fully-loaded sales rep, averaged across industries, costs $500,000“.  Wholly crap!  If that’s the average…  Half a million dollars?  If you add in salespeople who are “unengaged” that’s like $382.5 billion dollars!
5. I think the executives at Oracle could have saved a lot of time and money on their social CRM strategy by just putting a big Linkedin button in the application so salespeople can more easily update their resumes – which is the only social networking they’ll be doing as long as their company is using Oracle CRM.