Q&A with Oracle's Charles Phillips -- Putting The Pieces In Place

Computer Reseller News Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge) CMP Channel Senior Editor Rick Whiting spoke with Oracle President Charles Phillips in an exclusive interview about Oracle's new SMB initiative. Here are excerpts from that discussion:

CRN: Why undertake this push now with Oracle's Technology products into SMB markets?

Phillips: We've finally got the ease-of-use and packaging right. Before, the focus was on enterprise capabilities like scalability. Now [the database] is a lot easier to install and configure. That's made it a lot easier for the midmarket. Another factor is that some distributors and resellers came to Oracle because they wanted a database on Linux. We're basically the main game in Linux. So the pieces are in place. The number of resellers and, hopefully, customers that can access the product has gone up substantially.

CRN: What are the strengths and weaknesses of Oracle's products in SMB markets?

Phillips: A strength is that customers can start out with [the SMB version of] the product and grow into the enterprise version. The ISV base is unmatched. And we're on every platform everybody cares about. Our only challenge now is reaching more customers via distribution and resellers.CRN: How much of your competition in databases comes from Microsoft?

Phillips: We don't see Microsoft in the enterprise space. They're more focused on competing with Google and building Xboxes. On the very low end, in organizations with 300 employees or less, they have the brand name and a reputation for being easier to use. There is the impression that Oracle is harder to use and higher priced. Our challenge is to re-educate the reseller.

CRN: Why so much emphasis on the channel for this initiative?

Phillips: It's just not a market that's well-suited for a direct-sales force. I think a lot of resellers would like an alternative to Microsoft-certainly the distributors have told us that. Over 80 percent of [Oracle Database] Standard Edition One goes through the channel and that's increasing.

CRN: What other products could be added to the VAD Remarketer program?

Phillips: We have a broad family of products. We have in-memory and embedded databases. There's a lot going on in [Fusion] middleware that could be brought down to SMB markets. And there are other things coming.

CRN: Why establish the new Oracle SMB Technology Program Office?

Phillips: You need a program office to look at this from the customer perspective and to provide focus and accountability. We needed it because with this program we needed to change processes, licensing and packaging, and there are legal and financial aspects to consider.

Source: www.crn.com

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Oracle has increased its offer price for an additional stake in i-Flex

Oracle has increased the price it is willing to pay for an additional stake in i-Flex solutions, a vendor of financial software in Mumbai, India.

The move follows a period of sharp increases in company valuations on India's stock market, and Oracle may have felt that increasing its offer was necessary to make its offer more attractive for i-flex shareholders, analysts said.

Oracle, of California, said Thursday said it has increased its offer price to 2,100 Indian rupees (AU$60) per share, including interest. The company also said that it has raised by about 35 percent the number of shares it has agreed to buy in the pending open offer to i-flex shareholders.

The new open offer price is a 42 percent premium to the 1,475 rupees per share that Oracle first offered, and a 20 per cent premium to i-flex's closing stock price on Thursday of 1,751 rupees.

Indian stock markets are booming, and investor expectations are high, said a financial analyst who declined to be named. Oracle may have not found sufficient support for the offer at its earlier price, he said. The price of i-flex's shares has risen by over 52 percent in the last six months. Oracle informed the Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) in September that it intended to acquire an additional 20 percent of the equity of i-flex. It already holds a 55 percent stake in the company. Oracle would be paying about $531 million for the additional stake. Oracle subsequently delayed the open date of the offer from Nov. 6 to Dec. 4.

In an statement to the BSE on Friday, i-flex said that Oracle had increased the number of shares it wanted to purchase in the open offer from the earlier 16.63 million to 28.39 million, representing 34.14 percent of the emerging voting capital. An i-flex spokeswoman declined to comment on the new offer.

Oracle will be paying about $1.7 billion for the additional equity if its offer sails through. The open offer closes on Dec. 23.

Author: John Ribeiro

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EMC and Oracle buckle up for joint integration ride

EMC Corporation and Oracle have announced a broadened investment in joint engineering testing and integration and solutions development to support customers who are deploying EMC Information Infrastructure in Oracle environments.

EMC's Information Infrastructure offerings provide a range of hardware, software, and services for enterprise applications, database, and middleware solutions.
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Jointly integrated services, solutions, and support seek to help customers avoid multi-vendor complexity when deploying end-to-end information infrastructure solutions based on EMC and Oracle technologies.

The EMC Information Infrastructure for Oracle includes four solution areas: Data Warehousing, whereby EMC partners with the Oracle Information Appliance Program to offer customers packaged, low-cost data warehouse solutions that are high performance, quick to deploy, and can easily scale through validated building blocks known as Foundations; Oracle Unbreakable Linux, jointly engineered grid computing solutions backed by the Oracle Unbreakable Linux support program which have generated Oracle Validated Configurations and pre-defined best practices, allowing customers to reduce deployment time while minimizing risk with tested and qualified Oracle Enterprise Linux on core EMC platforms and software; Enterprise Security, integrating RSA security technologies and Oracle's identity management and data protection solutions along with user authentication, database encryption, and compliance reporting tools for database applications across the enterprise; and Grid Computing, using joint reference architectures and best practices for midrange environments to help customers rapidly deploy Oracle Grid Computing environments across EMC NAS or SAN platforms with low-cost tiered storage for simplified consolidated management and unique business continuance software for transaction consistency. All EMC Information Infrastructure for Oracle Solutions are backed by the EMC-Oracle Joint Escalation Center that provides customers a dedicated single path for support.A file is a file, the saying goes, but not all files are the same. Logically, they are just bits on a disk. However, from a usage perspective this is where the commonality ends. Databases are very different from plain text files and have differing usage scenarios and storage performance needs. Likewise, not all databases are the same. Oracle database solutions have specific performance and data storage requirements that are part of Oracle's articulated strategy for storage, which involves clustering, disk management and replication, as well as promoting the Linux OS.

The choice of storage architecture affects database performance, storage utilization, suitability as a high-availability solution, and the ability to tune and optimize the solution to meet organizational goals. Organizations deploying storage solutions that are not in alignment with Oracle's strategy as instantiated by Oracle 10g, ASM, and RAC may find themselves at a disadvantage from an operational and competitive standpoint.

As such, the availability of tried, tested, and true storage infrastructure for Oracle databases is well positioned to assist organizations get the most from their extensive Oracle investments, which for many represent the operational lifeblood of their enterprise.

To appreciate the significance of this announcement, one must consider the depth of the technical and commercial relationship the two companies share, and the dependency upon one another that they have developed over time. The Oracle Global Single Instance, which has been promoted by Oracle as the driving force behind a multi-billion dollar IT cost savings, runs on a variety of EMC hardware.

Similarly, EMC is one of the five largest Oracle customers in the world, based on the number of Oracle Application modules, users, and database instances deployed. The two companies' first-hand experience with each other, which should mirror the many operational experiences of customer organizations, feeds each other's product requirements and assessments.

This does allow many of the deployment and usage "gotchas" that are inevitable in the customer environment to be experienced firsthand by the vendors, which should help alleviate issues sooner rather than later and reduce the likelihood of the issues impacting end-customer's production environments.

Overall, this announcement will likely be welcomed by the many organizations, large and small, that depend on Oracle databases to run their businesses. Although vendor partnerships are common and sometimes short-lived, it is a rarity in the industry for such a deep vendor relationship to develop for a substantial period of time.

The obvious joint investments made by EMC and Oracle bode well for users of their certified technologies and serve as an example of the value of long-term strategic relationships not only for the vendors in question, but for their customers and partners as well.

Author: Clay Ryder, The Sageza Group

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