In less than a decade, the online delivery of software has transformed the business software landscape. The concept of online delivery is simple: A software company develops an application, hosts the software on its own servers, and makes it available to companies over the Internet. Companies sign up to use the application and pay for it on a subscription basis. No longer burdened with the time and expense necessary to maintain the software in-house, these companies are now free to focus on improving business processes and driving greater productivity and efficiency—the very reason they purchased the software in the first place.

From this simple concept, a whole new industry was born. Online delivery, also known as cloud computing or Software as a Service (“SaaS” for short) has grown to become one of the fastest growing segments in the world of enterprise software. Oracle Corporation has been at the forefront of the SaaS wave, with a suite of enterprise and productivity applications that have received customer and critical acclaim. The most successful of Oracle’s SaaS applications has been CRM€On Demand.

Since its launch in 2003, Oracle CRM On Demand has grown to become one of the fastest growing product lines in the Oracle applications family. The€tremendous success of CRM On Demand has spawned a new generation of Oracle SaaS offerings, ranging from innovative web applets such as Sales Library, Sales Prospector, and CRM€Gadgets, to enterprise-class applications such as PeopleSoft Talent Management and Siebel Deal Management. Oracle SaaS applications provide anytime, anywhere access directly from a web browser. Some applications also offer access from Blackberry and iPhone mobile devices. There is even an Oracle application that runs in Microsoft Outlook.