Oracle will take the conducting place in the market of CRM after InQuira purchase

Oracle on Thursday announced purchase of vendor of solutions of knowledge management InQuira, intending to improve it possibilities of the applications Fusion and Siebel CRM (customer relationship management).

Terms of transaction which should come to the end at the end of this year are not disclosed. The InQuira company has more than 80 clients, including Yahoo, 3M, Sprint and AVIS. Its technology development is intended to help the companies with increase in efficiency of service of transactions of clients. It helps call center agents in search of exact answers to questions of clients and also implements for clients search at forums and in communities in the self-service mode.

The company patented NLP technology (natural languag processing) which allows to understand "true intentions" of the customer's question, according to content of the website.

Anthony Lye, the senior vice president of the Oracle CRM direction, said that InQuira will be probable the central element of Oracle Fusion CRM service.

Fusion CRM is a part of the long-term program of preparation of the Oracle Fusion complex, the application of the next generation including the best opportunities of different products. Development of this long-awaited software lasts six years.

Despite own efforts made by Oracle in development of Fusion Applications, purchase of InQuira assumes that some aspects of the products Fusion will be solved as a result of this acquisition. Having caught InQuira, Oracle will get advantage as they have many clients, and is integrated by software of InQuira with CRM On Demand from Oracle since 2009.

InQuira also cooperates with SAP and IBM. For partners InQuira all "will proceed as usual" before completion of the transaction, declares Oracle, and after its end they will only benefit from growth of investments into a product.

The analyst Ray Wang, the CEO of Constellation Research, considers that in actions of Oracle there is a sense. According to him, InQuira - "one of the leading solution providers of knowledge management". "Within the last two years they were positioned on sale of solutions for Oracle or SAP", - Wang noted and added that knowledge management is "a critical component" of CRM systems, but most of them has "considerable spaces in this area" today.

Can seem that such vendors as Oracle which have content management systems, possibilities of corporate search could build own knowledge management systems. But the matter is that technologies of knowledge management are "a highly specialized niche" not only in terms of technology, but also the customer base also, notes Vang.