Business
That's right, Larry Ellison's handling your loan application...
Cambridgeshire County Council today announced a deal with ICL to install its CRM software in the Student Awards Service. In a £11m deal with Oracle and ICL, the service is using Oracle's 11i CRM suite to support 20 staff handling applications from 1,2000 students at once. The system will later be extended to allow students to check the progress of their applications online. Oracle and other big CRM vendors such as eWare, Onyx and Siebel, are heavily targeting the large and lucrative e-Government market. Siebel already has a large deal with Leeds City Council. Karen Smith, head of the Student Awards Service, said: "We have no specific targets for savings, but we hope to reap the rewards through better workflow monitoring, customer query management, and being able to track the full interaction histories of our customers." The system is a pilot project, proposed by ICL and Oracle rather than put out to public tender. The council's wider CRM project, Cambridgeshire Direct, is out to tender and will go live in December 2002.