Local business accelerates for Oracle with SMB push

In an exclusive interview with CRN, Schiff claimed its accelerator implementation solutions have been helping its reseller partners increase business.

“We’ve really brought some interesting news from a partner perspective into play and that is the ability for them to develop what we’re calling “business accelerators.” It’s a framework in which they can add their local specialty, their industry experience, their geographic experience into how products will be implemented,” he said.

Schiff claimed the approach provides substantial revenue opportunities for Oracle partners when they roll out the JD Edwards EnterpriseOne suite. “A key part of us working globally is helping partners develop industry-specific implementation offerings and tailoring that customer-by-customer without actually modifying code,” he said. “[Resellers can] use the flexibility of the system in a very user-friendly way to replicate different implementations in different industries.”

The accelerator concept acts as a toolset for partners, allowing them to use their industry-specific knowledge to help businesses quickly roll out applications.

Paul Liddiatt, senior director commercial accounts, Oracle, explained that the accelerator concept works by allowing partners to provide business solutions by using preintegrated application bundles and specific questions that identify a particular business' needs. For example, answering questions about currencies used will make configuration changes across purchasing, general ledger and supply chain software. Altering the answers will automatically reconfigure the applications.Liddiat went on to tell CRN that Oracle’s push into the SMB market with its JD Edwards solution has been a qualified success for the company.

“I think whichever measure you use, number of customers, installs or upgrades, you’d judge it as successful. We’ve certainly got customers from the very top of the scale down to the smaller mid-size businesses,” he said.

“A lot of the mid-size companies share the same problems as the bigger organisations, they just don’t have the resources to throw at them. The JD Edwards Enterprise One solution has that industry strength, that depth of functionality, but it’s also got the ability to be supported by a small team,” he added.

Oracle’s acquisition spree over the past year has had many industry observers wondering if the buying trend would continue through 2008. Refusing to speculate on the possibility of future acquisitions, Schiff explained the business drivers behind the takeovers.

“Historically, we’ve said let’s look at an industry that’s given us real strong depth of functionality for industry solutions. An example of that can be the communications industry and we’ve made acquisitions to do that, the retail industry we’ve done that, farming, banking and finance, we’ve done a lot in that area. We were part of an acquisition, the JD Edwards side, and I have not seen a slow down in acquisitions,” he said.

“If you look at our application integration architecture, it says let’s lay a framework so that when we do make an acquisition we have the right technology to bring it to the marketplace for all of our customers. It’s really fundamental from a development point of view that we’re making that investment,” he added.

Since its acquisition by Oracle in 2005, Liddiat told CRN that JD Edwards has focused on updating its product line and rebuilding its relatively stagnant customer base.

“We’ve seen good evidence of customers buying again and upgrading to the later versions. We’ve listened to the reseller partners. They talk about the people they’ve had bringing forward the latest releases of JD Edwards, which is all very encouraging. We’re also getting over the problem of people recognising that the JD Edwards Enterprise One solution is still available and still for sale. There was certainly a period of time when that wasn’t clear and now we are getting past that.”

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