The new model is designed to appeal to companies who want to avoid price, maintenance and implementation barriers to core SFA applications. It will offer core functionality in OracleSalesOnline.com, such as customer and pipeline management, calendering and activity management, free of cost. And value-added functionalities such as sales compensation, global sales forecasting, and expense and travel management will be offered on a pay-per-use basis, in the next quarter, he added.

This model - which uses the same enterprise applications traditionally delivered on a CD - companies can rapidly deploy enterprise-class SFA capabilities, enabling sales organisations of any size to easily and actively manage the sales process.

Traditionally, companies have had to undertake expensive and time consuming implementations to receive the benefits of enterprise applications. With OracleSalesOnline.com, sales professionals can have personalized access to sale tools, such as income planning and forecasting, and can share information, updates, leads and follow-up activity with other users in their organisations, added Mr Gupta. Furthermore companies can throw away current local client-server systems which are expensive to maintain and begin the transformation to globalisation.

OracleSalesOnline.com is the first in a series of applications from the Oracle e-business suite that Oracle intends to bring online as a service.

Additional applications from the suite, such as customer service and marketing automation, are scheduled to be announced in the coming months.

Meanwhile, according to Mr Gupta, over 400 large to medium enterprise customers in over 15 countries are already managing their sales activities with OracleSalesOnline.com. This includes two Indian customers as well, even though no marketing or selling activity as started as yet, he added.

According to Ms Lisa Arthur, VP, CRM Marketing for Oracle Corporation, "Market for online business application will be $4.2 billion in 2004." And considering that we have registered 4,000 subscribers within the last week, shows how well positioned Oracle is to leverage this opportunity, she added.

According to Mr Gupta, the application will allow companies to define an unlimited number of users, and assign passwords and roles to them, as happens in an normal CRM solution. "Set up time, is 30 minutes of giving this information," he added.

The security of the database is ensured, by a 128-bit encryption key and deployment of stringent security standards. "Our product called Trusted Oracle has been used by agencies like CIA, and we will ensures the security of the database. However, for extremely security-sensitive customers, the best option would be to deploy Oracle SFA solution in their own servers."