As Oracle's fiscal year 2005 draws to a close today, we can look back over a year of milestones both for Oracle and its ISV partners. It has been a highly successful year yet for Oracle's EMEA ISV community, with ISV revenues growing 42% from last year.

Together we have seen particular success over the past twelve months in the midmarket, where more than 90% of Oracle-based applications come from the ISV community. As we move into fiscal year 2006, Oracle's intensifying focus on the midmarket will ensure even greater success for our ISV partners in this key growth sector.

Fiscal 2005 was also a year of major merger and acquisition activity for Oracle, with the incorporation of applications from PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, Oblix and Retek into the Oracle fold. Over the next few years the best of these products will be integrated with the Oracle product set in a major initiative called Project Fusion, which you can read more about below.

Introducing Oracle Fusion Middleware
Oracle Fusion Middleware is the new brand name for Oracle's range of award-winning middleware products, which includes the Oracle Application Server 10g and its family of applications development, integration and deployment tools, as well as the Oracle Collaboration Suite and Oracle Data Hubs. The rebrand is part of Oracle's Project Fusion product development roadmap, which aims to bring the recently-acquired PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, Retek and Oblix software solutions into increasing alignment with Oracle's own product range.

More and more ISVs are choosing to use Oracle's Fusion Middleware products as the integration and deployment layer for their own applications. In doing so they benefit from a ready-made, globally-recognised J2EE-compliant platform that allows their own customers to easily integrate their applications with legacy and other third-party systems, and to provide their users with access to multiple applications through a single, secure enterprise portal. Read more about Oracle Fusion Middleware in our featured news story.

ISVs A Critical Part of FY06 Strategy
As we move into fiscal year 2006, ISVs will continue to play an increasingly important role in Oracle's go to market strategy. Nowhere is this more true than in the midmarket, where Oracle continues to invest significant funds and resources to promote its ISV partners' solutions for this critical growth sector. Already, 1,000 EMEA ISVs are benefiting from Oracle's midmarket initiative, which promotes their solutions free of charge via a web page, CD-ROM and high quality lead generation activities conducted with Harte-Hanks and CNet. Phase 1 of this initiative delivered eight qualified leads each quarter to every participating ISV, and Phase 2 will see the initiative expand into 20 countries throughout the region.

Increased Industry Focus
In FY06 Oracle will also step up its industry-specific marketing and sales activities with ISVs, with individual countries empowered to identify local industry-specific solutions partners and create joint sales and marketing plans with complementary vendors. To reflect this, with this issue we are launching the first of a new series of sections focusing on Oracle's approach to partnering with ISVs in specific industry sectors. The new Public Sector section will be complemented by sections on Financial Services, Healthcare and Communications in future issues of this newsletter.

Expand into New Territories with Oracle
Finally, another crucial element of Oracle EMEA's ISV strategy for FY06 will be to increase our efforts to assist key, strategic ISV partners to expand into new geographical markets. With a strong local presence throughout EMEA, and a huge ecosystem of reseller, integrator and hardware partners across the region, Oracle is ideally placed to help ISVs find new markets and implementation partners in other countries. Qualifying ISVs will have their own dedicated pan-EMEA account manager, who will work with the partner to create a business plan for execution in multiple countries. To learn more about how existing ISV partners are working with Oracle in this way, you can read our profiles of partners eSpatial, Intec, TIA and i-flex.

As always, I hope that you will find this newsletter interesting and that you will be inspired to find out more about the benefits of becoming an Oracle partner. If you have any questions about anything contained in this newsletter, please don't hesitate to get in touch.