At Oracle's recent EMEA ISV managers' meeting in Croatia, we reviewed how far our regional ISV program has developed over the past year, and set out our goals for achieving true partnering excellence in the coming months.

Our fiscal year 2005 saw a 13% increase in Oracle's EMEA partner community. This rate of growth - even in a time of significant consolidation among software vendors - is testament to the technological leadership of our products, the high demand for Oracle-based solutions across all industry markets, and the strength and quality of our worldwide partner program, the Oracle PartnerNetwork.

We aim to better this in fiscal 2006. Oracle as a company is continually making it easier and more beneficial for ISVs to work with us. In this issue of our newsletter, you can find out how we can work together in two key sectors: Public Sector and Telecommunications, and learn how you can get involved in specific sales and marketing initiatives in those industries.

We also meet three new members of my EMEA ISV management team; Hartmuth Horny, Erwin Schiffner and Markus Reischl. All three have very specific remits to build and develop our ISV partner business, from enabling vendors to benefit from Oracle's favourably-priced Embedded Software Licence to helping local vendors expand their operations into new geographical markets. If you have any questions about any of their respective areas of responsibility, please do not hesitate to contact them. They are here to help you establish and build your business with Oracle.

Some vendors may still think of Oracle as a database company, but the opportunities to work with and resell our software stretch far beyond our market-leading Oracle Database 10g platform. Read about our revamped Oracle Applications Integration Initiative, whereby we are helping ISVs to integrate their solutions with any or all of Oracle's portfolio of applications suites, from Oracle E-Business Suite to PeopleSoft and JD Edwards - with the significant reselling opportunities that this provides.

Oracle is also a leading global vendor of open standards middleware products - and in this news article you can read about the new release of Oracle Application Server 10g - a complete, standards-based application server suite that provides you with a comprehensive environment for developing, integrating and deploying Oracle-based solutions with no need to develop any middleware of your own.

Everyone in the Oracle EMEA ISV team - and in the wider Oracle organisation - is committed to partnering and to achieving partnering excellence. We want to work with you, and to establish and grow our business together. This newsletter will give you a lot of information about the benefits of working with us, and, as always, I hope that you will find it useful, informative and entertaining. If you have any questions or comments about anything in this newsletter, or about Oracle's ISV program in general, please don't hesitate to get in touch.