Hewlett-Packard, Oracle Team Up For Sales

Hewlett-Packard and Oracle are teaming up to sell the Sales component of Oracle's Customer Relationship Management application suite.

Traditional enterprise resource planning vendors, such as PeopleSoft and SAP AG, that wish to gain new revenue from the rapidly expanding field of customer relationship management will now face the combined sales forces of Hewlett-Packard and Oracle. The alliance represents "the world's largest Customer Relationship Management sales force," Oracle officials said.

For several months, Customer Relationship Management has been a fast growing application for Oracle, and it is looking for an additional boost in sales through a high-profile alliance behind its CRM applications.

Hewlett-Packard has promised to implement Oracle's Sales CRM for its own sales force by early next year, while Oracle is promising to use Hewlett-Packard's servers in its data centers for e-mail and as its development platform. Among other things, the move will mean that Oracle will be able to fine-tune its application software to run on Hewlett-Packard systems, and Oracle's online application business will be powered under HP-UX, Ellison said.

The joint announcement yesterday paired Oracle Chairman Larry Ellison with Hewlett-Packard's new President and Chief Executive Carly Fiorina. The alliance, Fiorina said, "broadens both companies' reach."

The details of the alliance were negotiated in six weeks, she said, "a demonstration of the Internet speed with which both companies are moving." The two firms a month ago found common ground in linking arms behind Hewlett-Packard's high-level online business development language, eSpeak.

Ellison said "at least 50 percent" of Oracle's servers in its data centers and for e-mail from now on will be models from Hewlett-Packard.