Welcome from Bertram Mandel

Welcome to the second issue of our bimonthly newsletter for independent software vendors operating in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

Oracle has recently announced its third-quarter financial earnings, revealing a significant 17% increase in EMEA revenues from last year. This shows the strength of the Oracle market opportunity in the region, even during the soft spending environment. In this issue we introduce some key people within Oracle who can help you capitalise on this opportunity should you choose to become an Oracle partner.

Unlike other infrastructure software suppliers you may have worked with, Oracle imposes no restrictions on your choice of operating system or hardware platform. Choosing Oracle enables ISVs to draw upon multiple technology eco-systems and thus better address their customers' needs. In this article, Peter Perregaard, vice president of our Core Technology solutions business for EMEA, explains further the many benefits of an Oracle technology platform for ISVs and their customers.

Being purely a software company, Oracle has forged strong global, regional and local relationships with all of the leading hardware vendors. This means that Oracle can offer support for the widest range of access to the market of any software supplier. Find out how Oracle's partnerships with hardware vendors can benefit your business in this article by Paul Thompson, Director Platform Vendors, Alliances & Channels, Oracle EMEA.

Oracle's ISV relationships would not work if we did not have a team in place to work with our partners on the ground. This interview with the Oracle Netherlands ISV manager Rob van Doorn reveals how Oracle goes to market with its ISV partners in local country markets, and the benefits to ISVs of having a dedicated local team "on tap".

One of the best ways to get to know Oracle better is to come to one of our partner-focused events. The recent Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN) Days have proved a great success, with more than 3,500 partners and prospective partners coming to venues across the region to meet 1-1 with senior Oracle executives, find out in detail about what that Oracle PartnerNetwork has to offer, and network with their peers.

We also run a wide variety of events designed specifically for ISVs. For example, our series of ISV Application Server Roadshows attracted an audience of 700 vendors. Two-thirds of these were not Oracle partners, but were keen to find out more about Oracle's application server platform and how it could help their business. Feedback from the attendees was very positive and we will definitely be running the roadshow again. Find out more about our ISV-focused events and other initiatives in this article by Catherine Harrington, ISV Programme Manager for Oracle EMEA.

I hope that you will find the content of this newsletter stimulating, and that it will encourage you to find out more about what Oracle has to offer. Everything we do is based on feedback from the ISV community, so if you have any comments, questions or suggestions for content for this newsletter or any of our other activities, please don't hesitate to get in touch.

Bertram Mandel
Senior Director, Alliances & Channels, Oracle Europe, Middle East and Africa

On 14-16 March, Oracle's ISV Team Managers from across EMEA joined regional executives for the regular quarterly team meeting in Amsterdam. The objectives of the two and a half-day session were to review the success to date of our significantly increased investment in our ISV programme, and to refine our ISV-focused initiatives for fiscal 2005, which begins on 1st June 2004. | Read...