Oracle Misfires in Fiscal 2Q, Raising Tech Worries

Oracle stumbled in its latest quarter as the business software  maker struggled to close deals, a signal of possible trouble ahead for the technology sector.
The performance announced Tuesday covered a period of economic turbulence which has raised concerns that major companies and government agencies may curtail technology spending.

Oracle's results for the three months ending in November suggested the cutbacks have already started. Management reinforced that perception with a forecast calling for meager growth in the current quarter, which ends in February. The developments alarmed investors, causing Oracle Corp. shares to slide 10 percent.

In a telling sign of weakening demand, Oracle's sales of new software licenses edged up just 2 percent from the same time last year. Analysts had expected a double-digit gain in new software licenses. The company had predicted an increase of at least 6 percent and as much as 16 percent.

Wall Street focuses on this part of the business because selling new software products generates a stream of future revenue from maintenance and upgrades.

Oracle's software is a staple in companies and government agencies throughout the world. Its database products help companies store and manage information . Its line of applications automates a wide range of administrative tasks.

Part of the problem was that technology decision makers delayed signing contracts during the final few days of the quarter, according to Safra Catz, Oracle's chief financial officer. That could be an indication that companies and financially strapped government agencies are treading more carefully as Europe's debt problems threaten to hobble a still-fragile global economy.

"Clearly, this quarter was not what we thought it would be," Catz told analysts during a Tuesday conference call. She said the company is hoping some of the deals that were postponed in the last quarter will be completed within the next two months.

Oracle's weakest markets were in the U.S., Europe and Japan.

Things looked even bleaker in Oracle's computer  hardware division, which the company has been trying to build since buying fallen Silicon Valley star Sun Microsystems for $7.4 billion last year. Oracle's hardware revenue dropped 10 percent from the same time last year

If not for certain items, Oracle said it would have earned 54 cents per share. That figure fell below the average estimate of 57 cents per share among analysts polled by FactSet.

Revenue for the period edged up 2 percent from last year to $8.8 billion. Analysts, on average, had projected revenue of $9.2 billion.

In the current quarter, Oracle expects its adjusted earnings per share to range from 55 cents to 58 cents -- below the average analyst estimate of 59 cents per share. Revenue is expected to rise by 2 percent to 5 percent from the same time in the previous year. If Oracle hits that top end of that target, it would translate to revenue of about $9.2 billion -- below the analyst estimate of $9.4 billion, according to FactSet.

Oracle has expanded its sales force by about 1,700 people to fish for more customers during the second half of its fiscal year. About 111,000 employees worked at Oracle as of Nov. 30.

The company's shares shed $2.91 to hit $26.26 in extended trading after the second-quarter figures were released. The stock has been sagging since hitting $36.50 in May.

In an effort to bolster the stock, Oracle announced it will spend an additional $5 billion to buy back its shares. The company, which is based in Redwood Shores, Calif., didn't set a timetable to complete the stock purchases. Oracle spent about $1 billion buying 33 million shares in its most recent quarter.

German Privacy Watchdog Dislikes Facebook's Like

 A German data  protection authority is "unliking" Facebook's "Like" button. The state of Schleswig-Holstein's data protection commissioner, Thilo Weichert, on Friday ordered state institutions to shut down the fan pages on the social  networking site and remove the "Like" button from their Web sites, saying it leads to profiling that violates German and European law.
Facebook insisted Friday that is in full compliance  with European data protection laws.

On Friday, Weichert issued a statement saying technical analysis by his office shows Facebook violated German and European data protection laws by passing content data to the social network 's servers in the U.S.

"Whoever visits facebook.com or uses a plug-in must expect that he or she will be tracked by the company for two years," Weichert said. "Facebook builds a broad individual and for members even a personalized profile."

A Facebook spokesman conceded that the company can see "information such as the IP address" of users who visit a site with a "Like" button.

"We delete this technical data within 90 days," said the spokesman, who did not give his name in keeping with company policy. "That is in keeping with normal industry standards."

Weichert's office ordered Web site owners in Schleswig-Holstein to "immediately stop the passing on of user data to Facebook in the USA by deactivating the respective services" and threatened to take legal action if they fail to comply.

He also urged Internet users in general to "keep their fingers from clicking on social plug-ins" and "not set up a Facebook account" to avoid being profiled.

The keepers of Germany's strict privacy laws have repeatedly clashed on issues of privacy with international Internet giants, such as Facebook and Google -- often with success.

Last year Google allowed Germans who opposed its Street View mapping system to blur images of their homes, while Facebook in January granted members more control  over their email address books, after a dispute over its "Friend Finder" service.

Germany's latest spat with the Palo Alto, California-based Facebook also comes a week after a leading member of Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservative party in Schleswig-Holstein stepped down after admitting to having an affair with a 16-year-old he met over the social networking site.

Christian von Boetticher's resignation sparked a debate about the role of social media in politicians' lives, with German newspapers carrying reports from party members, angry that the state legislator spent more time posting personal information to Facebook than focusing on his job. He has since deleted his Facebook profile.

Businesses Find Ways To Adapt in Slow Economy

 In a slow economy, small business  owners know what to do: adapt. "We have to constantly keep adjusting," says Janice Cutler, president of North Raleigh Florist in North Carolina. She has changed her marketing strategy since the start of the recession in late 2007. That has kept people buying -- even though flowers aren't always a high priority.
At Graphic Imagery, a printing company in South San Francisco, owner Rachel Imison and her husband are working harder for each sale. And they've invested in new equipment that gets the work done better.

Here's a look at how four small business owners have adapted to an economy that keeps limping along:

MARKETING YOUR WAY TO BETTER SALES

Cutler says her floral business has done well despite the recession because people still need flowers for holidays, special occasions and big events like weddings. "But the economy has definitely affected us in that we would be doing better," if some customers weren't cutting back on regular purchases, she says. For example, consumers and companies that used to order flowers regularly as decorations.

Her answer to the recession was to market her flowers differently. "We do more than just sell flowers. It's a sentiment," she says. The strategy has been working. Cutler says, "we've honestly had double-digit growth every month."

This time of year is normally slow for her business. So, "there are weeks that we seem to work harder" to make a sale, Cutler says.

FINDING A WAY TO DO MORE, BETTER, FASTER

At Graphic Imagery, "we are working longer hours, customers are demanding more for less, the average value of each sale is lower," Imison says. But she understands that her customers are under as much pressure as her company is.

To meet customers' greater demands, Graphic Imagery invested $500,000 in equipment that allows it to print more efficiently and cheaply. It's able to make booklets and brochures faster -- sometimes in as little as a day.

The company is also trying to keep its costs down. It's putting off hiring because, while business has been good, "we're not confident yet," Imison says. One reason why: April was a terrible month for printers in her area, and she's not sure why. Imison says May, June and July have been busy, "but we're not out of the woods yet."

Her family is putting off its vacation this year, something it also did during the recession. "We're still anxious" Imison says.
DOING A DIFFERENT KIND OF WORK

Alan Gaynor & Co., a New York-based architectural firm, was primarily doing interior design work for companies before the recession. That meant redesigning lobbies, offices and other spaces. That type of business began to slow at the start of 2008. But the firm started getting more projects to renovate building infrastructure.

"We realized that was a good market for us," says Michele Boddewyn, the firm's president. She says that after the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008, the market for corporate interior design "was very dead."

The interior design market has recovered somewhat, but projects are smaller. Boddewyn says of clients, "if they have a wish list of 10 things, maybe they're hitting seven of those 10." And they're shying away from flashy decor.

Boddewyn says Gaynor has seen the design business slip again the last few months along with the economy. She says some clients might inquire about a project, but "they're having cold feet about it."

GIVE CUSTOMERS THEIR MONEY'S WORTH

Brian Butler's dry cleaning business in Columbus, Ohio, caters to affluent customers. He says Dublin Cleaners held on to them by giving them superior service. Like Graphic Imagery, his company invested in new equipment and technology that improved the quality of its work and also made it easier to satisfy customers' needs.

Some of the equipment is in his plant. But his delivery people now have cell phones, so customers can reach those employees if there's a problem, and get it resolved faster.

Dublin had its best sales in 2007. Business fell in 2008 through 2010, but Butler says sales were down only 2 percent to 4 percent each year. That was below the industry average of 10 percent. He says the company is back up near its 2007 level.

Important Customer Relationship Management. Is CRM

Customer Relationship Management, is a company-wide business strategy designed to reduce costs and increase profitability by solidifying customer loyalty. True CRM brings together information from all data sources within an organization (and where appropriate, from outside the organization) to give one, holistic view of each customer in real time. This allows customer facing employees in such areas as sales, customer support, and marketing to make quick yet informed decisions on everything from cross-selling and upselling opportunities to target marketing strategies to competitive positioning tactics.

Once thought of as a type of software, CRM has evolved into a customer-centric philosophy that must permeate an entire organization. There are three key elements to a successful CRM initiative: people, process, and technology. The people throughout a company-from the CEO to each and every customer service rep-need to buy in to and support CRM. A company's business processes must be reengineered to bolster its CRM initiative, often from the view of, How can this process better serve the customer? Firms must select the right technology to drive these improved processes, provide the best data to the employees, and be easy enough to operate that users won't balk. If one of these three foundations is not sound, the entire CRM structure will crumble.

It's a strategy used to learn more about customers' needs and behaviors in order to develop stronger relationships with them. After all, good customer relationships are at the heart of business success. There are many technological components to CRM, but thinking about CRM in primarily technological terms is a mistake. The more useful way to think about CRM is as a process that will help bring together lots of pieces of information about customers, sales, marketing effectiveness, responsiveness and market trends.

If customer relationships are the heart of business success, then CRM is the valve the pumps a company's life blood. As such, CRM is best suited to help businesses use people, processes, and technology to gain insight into the behavior and value of customers. This insight allows for improved customer service, increased call center efficiency, added cross-sell and upsell opportunities, improved close rates, streamlined sales and marketing processes, improved customer profiling and targeting, reduced costs, and increased share of customer and overall profitability.

This sounds like a panacea, but CRM is not without its challenges. For CRM to be truly effective, an organization must convince its staff that change is good and that CRM will benefit them. Then it must analyze its business processes to decide which need to be reengineered and how best to go about it. Next is to decide what kind of customer information is relevant and how it will be used. Finally, a team of carefully selected executives must choose the right technology to automate what it is that needs to be automated. This process, depending upon the size of the company and the breadth of data, can take anywhere from a few weeks to a year or more. And although some firms are using Web-based CRM technologies for only hundreds of dollars per month per user, large companies may spends millions to purchase, install, and customize the technology required to support its CRM initiative.

Training Camp’s Dynamics CRM immersion courses

Training is one of the foundations of CRM adoption – if people don’t know how to use a system, and if it’s not clear how a system will benefit them, they won’t use it. The same goes for the partners who implement CRM systems.
So how do you take someone with an IT background and bring them up to speed with CRM in a hurry? One solution might be an immersive course – stick them in a CRM boot camp and drill them until they know a CRM solution backward and forward.
“Actually, I hate the term ‘boot camp,’” says David Minutella, vice president of education for Training Camp, a developer of IT training programs that’s rolling out just such an accelerated set of courses dealing with Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0. “We call it accelerated training – we get you in there, house you, and then have you in a classroom for 10 hours a day so you can focus what you need to learn.”
Having attended a boot camp, I can assure you that a program like this would suffer little from an absence of tear gassing, draconian haircutting policies and random yelling, although occasional forced push-ups might help focus attention, but that’s neither here nor there. The program takes students from their home organizations and houses and feeds the students, who have access to lab facilities – and instructors – 24 hours a day. Minutella says the outcome-based learning of this program is based around a lecture-lab-review format, or as he puts it simply: “we teach it, teach it again, then teach it one more time.”
The two courses, Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 Applications and Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 Installations and Deployment, aim to instill in-depth knowledge of the configuration, management and customization of the application, as well as instruction on new features, installation and networking with Windows Vista. The take away for the companies sending the pupils to the accelerated training is an in-house expert on Dynamics CRM 4.0 who’s ready to work on the solution upon arriving home after just a few days away away (Applications is 10 days and Installations and Deployment is seven days, but the training doesn’t have to be bak-to-back); for students, completing the course and exams means they’ll get the Microsoft Certified Business Management Solutions Specialist and Professional Application certifications.
The program launched last month, and Minutella said “there’s already been quite a bit of interest.” Training Camp also wants to launch a third track dealing with customizations to Dynamics CRM 4.0.