We've been pretty busy recently with a couple of client demos, so we unfortunately didn't get around to posting the August 2013 release of Oracle RightNow Cloud Service (also known as the Oracle Service Cloud) when it was first announced. On the flip side, it did give us some time to go over all those exciting new features!

We've been pretty busy recently with a couple of client demos, so we unfortunately didn't get around to posting the August 2013 release of Oracle RightNow Cloud Service (also known as the Oracle Service Cloud) when it was first announced. On the flip side, it did give us some time to go over all those exciting new features!

The most powerful message in this release has been the continuing convergence of several Oracle offers under the Service Cloud: The new Oracle Service Cloud offer.

Regarding Policy Automation, Oracle have already been offering their Oracle Policy Automation (OPA) as a cloud service for some time (see our previous blog post on OPA) and we've personally seen some very interesting work from Oracle on using it together with RightNow to handle complex processes, so stay tuned for further developments.

A new entry on the Service Cloud portfolio is for Field Service. This is a category for which Oracle has a few offers, where Siebel is arguably Oracle's best product so far. Although Oracle had already hinted at integrating Siebel with the Service Cloud in the coming Siebel 2013Q4 8.1.1.11 Innovation Pack (check out our blog post on the high-level future roadmap for Siebel), a more likely candidate to fill that spot could come from a mix of Oracle E-Business Suite family of Service Applications (Oracle Field Service) and other products such as Oracle Real Time Scheduler. We're definitely looking forward to more news around this topic and will keep you posted as more information is released.

Some other previous Oracle purchases being integrated/consolidated in this release of the Service Cloud are Oracle ATG Web Commerce to streamline online sales and unify commerce and customer service and Inquire (now Oracle Knowledge) for high-end, high-volume federated content.

This brings the Service, Sales and Marketing Clouds one step closer to the familiar vision put forward by Oracle back in 2011, around their then-latest acquisitions: Oracle CX loop.

In the meantime, Oracle have provided an overview of all the new features in this release of the cloud service: Oracle Service Cloud August 2013 feature map.

You will surely have noticed that there are no details about the Field Service offer on that feature map just yet, but for a description of the rest of those features you can watch the Oracle webcast, which also includes comprehensive walkthroughs for ATG and OPA integration:

Download the video here.

For full details, check out the August 2013 release notes.

If you would like to know more about Oracle Service Cloud August 2013 and its features, give us a call or drop us an email.