Onyx tempts resellers with juicy rebate

CRM vendor Onyx Software has offered a juicy rebate to resellers for poaching customers from rival Oracle and its numerous recent acquisitions, including PeopleSoft, JD Edwards and Siebel.

Geoff Denyer, director of strategic alliances at Onyx, said the company was offering up to $500,000 towards the implementation costs of a customer's migration from whatever platform was being used.

"The $500,000 is a cap. It's actually 50 percent of the net licensing revenue," he said. "So if the price for Onyx was $1 million, we would give them $500,000. If it was half a million, it would be $250,000."

The rebate would be backed up by various Onyx marketing initiatives. Globally, Onyx -- which did about US$70 million in revenue for calendar year 2004 -- had about five percent of the CRM market and a similar percentage in Australia, Denyer added.

Gartner figures reported in the press suggested that Oracle earned US$725 million in 2004, or 20 percent of the total global spend of around US$3.46 billion. SAP came second with US$600 million, he said.

He said Onyx was manouevreing to win more marketshare at a time when its bete noire was comparatively weak.

Confusion from Oracle's recent acquisitions had already started and was likely to continue until 2008, he said.

"It gives customers an opportunity to disengage themselves from the complete beast they have become involved with," Denyer said.

He said customers were likely confused about what the future held. "It will be 2008 before Oracle delivers on [acquisition integration plan] Project Fusion," he said. "And now they have bought Siebel as well."

Onyx Software announced earlier this year that it was targeting sales growth by signing boutique resellers and system integrators with either a broad focus or niche vertical specialities and a focus on CRM or business process management.

Denyer said that push would continue.

Change management, data integration and data consolidation had become increasingly complex for many end-users, making it critical to for vendors to have educated partners to play out that role, he said.

"We're going to go from basically zero dollars of revenue through the channel. Our goal is quite aggressive and next year our goal is to do half through the channel and half direct," Denyer said at the time of the earlier announcement.