Oracle aims for users from start to grid

LONDON — Enterprise software giant Oracle Corp. may be known for big plans and bold moves but when it comes to capturing the European market the Redwood Shores, California, company has realized it also has to think small.

In kicking off the second day of its OpenWorld conference in London on Tuesday Oracle highlighted products and partners for smaller companies.

The company unveiled an entry-level application server, the Oracle Application Server Standard Edition One, aimed at enterprises with limited IT resources. It also introduced a new partner program to target companies with Oracle’s starter database product, the Oracle Database 10g Standard Edition One.

Given that the European market is dominated by smaller companies that rely on local distributors and resellers, the new offerings may come as little surprise. Oracle executives at the show estimated that there are some 20 million small organizations in Europe.

“Small and medium-sized businesses are very, very important to Oracle,” said company vice president of technology in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) Andrew Sutherland during an interview Tuesday.

“These companies have the opportunity for enormous growth and because they are starting out with advanced products they have the chance to leapfrog larger companies in terms of technology,” Sutherland said.

For Oracle, the idea is to scale up from a single processor all the way to grid computing technology, which is getting a big-banner push from the company. While the company was pitching small businesses software at the show, its grid computing plans were at a fever pitch.

Oracle President Charles Phillips touted the potential of the grid upon opening the conference on Monday, and that theme was carried through by Chuck Rozwat, executive vice president of development server technologies, during his Tuesday morning keynote.

“The news is we have a grid infrastructure now that lets you build applications like adding hardware components,” Rozwat said.

For smaller businesses, it’s one application at a time, however, and Oracle is hoping to snag these customers even when they are on the first rung.

The company is wooing small and medium-size businesses (SMBs) with Application Server Standard Edition One’s prebuilt portal application, which offers basic content management and publishing capabilities. The new entry-level middleware offering is priced at half that of its full-featured Enterprise Application Server, at $4,995 per processor, for up to two processors, or $149 per named user with a minimum of five users. European pricing for Application Server Standard Edition One is €4,175 per processor, or €125 per user.

The company said that the new software is getting strong support from its distribution partners, resellers and distributors as they try to generate further growth in the SMB market. It has no clustering capabilities but can be scaled up, Sutherland said.

“The beauty here is that you can write an application on one processor and move onto the Standard Edition, and on up to a cluster. This is highly scalable software,” Sutherland said.

To help move companies up the scale, Oracle is also relying on its Independent Software Vendor (ISV) partners to offer applications that maximize grid technologies, Sutherland said. This is especially the case in Europe where customers seem particularly keen on grid computing, and where there are a number of nascent markets whose companies aren’t saddled with large, legacy systems, he added.

Hoping to speak to these ISV partners, Oracle held a separate Partner Network ISV Forum at OpenWorld this week for the first time in Europe. It also took the opportunity to introduce a new partner level Tuesday, called QuickStart, which offers a company rapid enrollment in Oracle’s partner program at a fee of €250 for members targeting users with Database 10g Standard One Edition.

At least one attendee agreed that partner support was crucial if Oracle hoped to get wide distribution of its database software.

“In some ways, the point of these conferences is for users like me to talk to the partners and developers to express our interest in something like utility computing and to push for the applications we need to make upgrading worthwhile,” said Roger Ashmore, database administrator and technical applications specialist for Petri-Canada.

OpenWorld London runs through Wednesday.

(Laura Rohde in London contributed to this report.)