By Denis Pombriant, Beagle Research, March 30

"Oracle announced Release 17 of CRM On-Demand today along with an updated vertical market version for the pharmaceutical industry. Seventeen is a lot of releases even for a SaaS company and Oracle should be proud of the milestone. The same is true of the emphasis on the pharmaceutical industry vertical.

Oracle comes to the pharma CRM market with an assist from Siebel, the one time independent leader in CRM that Oracle bought a few years back. Before the acquisition Siebel and its pharma package had managed to corner about nineteen of the top twenty pharmaceutical companies.

For a time in the last decade you could go from job to job as a pharma rep taking your Siebel skills with you and feel right at home. The writing on the wall now though is that pharmaceutical sales is transitioning to a SaaS model and Oracle is managing the transition for its customers.

Oracle's done a good job of keeping up with changes in the industry and you have to admit that pharma sales is a different kettle of fish than almost anything else in CRM." For additional insights, read here.