By all accounts, the prediction is bold – that customer relationship management (CRM) will die. Therefore, it follows that CRM players such as Siebel Systems and Onyx Software will go the way of the dinosaur because CRM products, by themselves are not complete.

So said Larry Ellison, the chairman and chief executive of Oracle Corporation to the 23,000 attendees at OracleWorld 2002 recently. OracleWorld 2002 is a technology event attended by database and information systems professionals. It was held in San Francisco, California recently.

Via satellite from Auckland, New Zealand, the flamboyant Ellison said that CRM products are, at the moment, sold as standalone solutions that are not linked to other components of the enterprise. Such products are sold to customers, instructions not included.

This means that companies that embark on CRM projects have to engage consultants and systems integrators to customise their applications so that it can be linked to the other parts of the enterprise.

Ellison is in Auckland competing in the Louis Vuitton Cup as part of the Oracle BMW Racing team. The winning team will then go on to compete in the well-known and very prestigious America's Cup.

To be more effective, CRM solutions should have links to the web store, sales and marketing, human resources.

A bleak future for incomplete software integration aside, Ellison went on to talk about the other serious problems in information processing which are data fragmentation and incomplete automation.

"It's almost as if we think of our customers as computer hobbyists," he said. "We don't really sell complete business systems; instead we sell technology components."

Oracle, said its chief, was also guilty of this but the company is changing.

After all, it is in the best interests of the vendor to provide a product that works easily and effectively.

To this end, Oracle has come out with a product that integrates the middleware with the application server.

The components that are needed are installed and managed together and are able to work as one unit.

Oracle, said Ellison, tested this out with its own customers. Prior to this, about 85 per cent of Oracle's clients had to customise their software but today, using Oracle's Real Application Server, the same number do little or no customisation at all.

Apart from this, the company has also rolled out Oracle Collaboration Suite, a productivity product.

What is clear is that the winds of change are sweeping through the company. And it is adapting its products to serve the customer better.

For, at the end of the day, the companies that are going to succeed are those that make it easy for their clients to do business, any which way they choose.