The “Gentler” Giant’s Value Proposition to Overcome the “Little Guys’” Perception
Software giant Oracle, a long-time provider of enterprise software systems for the largest of corporations worldwide, has now set its sights on the small to medium business (SMB) market, thereby giving Microsoft and other leaders in this segment the kind of competition they have never had to contend with before. The vendor has begun a campaign to attract smaller partners in an effort to show SMBs that its offerings are viable choices for their organizations. For more background, please see part one of this series, A “Gentler” Giant’s Success in Reaching Out to the “Little Guys.”
Strong Product and Capabilities Still Matter
As mentioned in part one of this series, resellers have to work directly with value-added distributors (VADs) that are Oracle Remarketer Authorized to transact orders using Oracle's standard terms, conditions, and pricing for Oracle's 1-Click Ordering Programs, which currently include the following:
* Oracle Database Standard Edition and Standard Edition One, including Oracle Warehouse Builder, an extract, transform, and load (ETL) tool, and Oracle Application Express, a rapid development tool for Web applications atop the Oracle database.
* Oracle Application Server Standard Edition and Standard Edition One, and Oracle Application Server Java Edition—application servers that are all part of the Oracle Fusion Middleware family for hosting a company's web site and applications. This middleware suite also provides an instant portal for creating an extranet and content management for managing unstructured information, such as purchase orders, marketing collateral, or presentations. Oracle Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) is an additional tool.
* Oracle Business Intelligence Standard Edition One—this business intelligence (BI) product provides users with access to dashboards (via Oracle Interactive Dashboards) to format and distribute reports (via Oracle BI Publisher) and to enable ad hoc analysis of data integrated from disparate sources (via Oracle Answers).
Oracle Database is the company's flagship product and the main element of the Oracle VAD Remarketer Program discussed in A “Gentler” Giant’s Success in Reaching Out to the “Little Guys.” . In mid-2007, the vendor launched Oracle Database 11g. This product, which at this stage is not part of this initiative, features new technology to accelerate the adoption of database grids, improve storage, and simplify access to data in online analytical processing (OLAP) cubes.
The previous version of the company's flagship database, Oracle 10g R2, came out in 2005, two years after the original version of Oracle Database 10g. The "g" in 10g and 11g stands for "grid," as in grid (or utility) computing. With 10g, Oracle introduced the feature that it refers to as Real Application Clusters (RACs). These are a way to join servers running Oracle's database together to work on database queries in parallel (see Oracle Further Orchestrates Its SOA Forays). According to Oracle, about half of its database customers have upgraded to 10g, with a fraction using RAC grids.
Among 11g features that Oracle hopes will attract more users to its grid computing systems are Oracle Real Application Testing and Oracle Data Guard. These features allow the splitting of grids to permit the testing of upgrades or system changes before moving them into production, as well as to facilitate backup and disaster recovery. Storage improvements in the latest release include automated data partitioning, better data compression, a feature for backing out of delinquent transactions, and the Oracle Total Recall capability. Oracle Total Recall allows administrators to run queries against the data as it stood at a specified point in the past. Finally, Oracle Database 11g allows native integration with the Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 development tool set, which was done with the hope of attracting Microsoft partners.
Until recently, Oracle’s research and development (R&D) emphasis has been on performance and scalability (i.e., customer satisfaction and product quality) rather than price and ease-of-use for the masses. The company remains the overall database market share leader, and it now insists that, after years of playing and trying, it has finally gotten the ease-of-use (employee productivity) and packaging formula (i.e., a better solution value—more features for lower cost) established, and it is ready to make a renewed push to small businesses. In fact, Oracle touts many recent benchmarks that purport its leadership in database performance and value, such as that Oracle Database 10g is 45 percent faster and 14 percent cheaper than Microsoft SQL Server 2005.
According to the Transaction Processing Performance Council (www.tpc.org), the Oracle database is also the price and performance leader in the TPC-C online transaction processing (OLTP) performance benchmark and the TPC-H data warehouse performance benchmark. Also, Oracle Database 10g Standard Edition One comes cheaper than Microsoft SQL Server 2005 SE, in terms of both the number of users and the number of sockets. Given that the database is also tightly integrated with Microsoft Windows, Oracle also touts a better (i.e., lesser) price and performance figure on that operating system too.
The typical problem with non-Oracle databases is when a small customer calls and asks the resellers for a small server to build a database. The straightforward solution is to sell the customer a two-way server with a standard Microsoft SQL Server database. Six months later, the same customer might call again and ask for a little more horsepower, in which case the reseller will offer a four-way server and more standard SQL Server software. However, some time down the road, when the customer’s business is really booming and it could use even more horsepower, a dead end appears in terms of a more scalable offering.
Conversely, the Oracle alternative is to sell this customer a two-way server from Hewlett-Packard (HP) with Oracle Database 10g Standard Edition One. Several months later, that solution is still working great, but the company could use a little more horsepower. The Oracle reseller now has the following options:
Software giant Oracle, a long-time provider of enterprise software systems for the largest of corporations worldwide, has now set its sights on the small to medium business (SMB) market, thereby giving Microsoft and other leaders in this segment the kind of competition they have never had to contend with before. The vendor has begun a campaign to attract smaller partners in an effort to show SMBs that its offerings are viable choices for their organizations. For more background, please see part one of this series, A “Gentler” Giant’s Success in Reaching Out to the “Little Guys.”
Strong Product and Capabilities Still Matter
As mentioned in part one of this series, resellers have to work directly with value-added distributors (VADs) that are Oracle Remarketer Authorized to transact orders using Oracle's standard terms, conditions, and pricing for Oracle's 1-Click Ordering Programs, which currently include the following:
* Oracle Database Standard Edition and Standard Edition One, including Oracle Warehouse Builder, an extract, transform, and load (ETL) tool, and Oracle Application Express, a rapid development tool for Web applications atop the Oracle database.
* Oracle Application Server Standard Edition and Standard Edition One, and Oracle Application Server Java Edition—application servers that are all part of the Oracle Fusion Middleware family for hosting a company's web site and applications. This middleware suite also provides an instant portal for creating an extranet and content management for managing unstructured information, such as purchase orders, marketing collateral, or presentations. Oracle Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) is an additional tool.
* Oracle Business Intelligence Standard Edition One—this business intelligence (BI) product provides users with access to dashboards (via Oracle Interactive Dashboards) to format and distribute reports (via Oracle BI Publisher) and to enable ad hoc analysis of data integrated from disparate sources (via Oracle Answers).
Oracle Database is the company's flagship product and the main element of the Oracle VAD Remarketer Program discussed in A “Gentler” Giant’s Success in Reaching Out to the “Little Guys.” . In mid-2007, the vendor launched Oracle Database 11g. This product, which at this stage is not part of this initiative, features new technology to accelerate the adoption of database grids, improve storage, and simplify access to data in online analytical processing (OLAP) cubes.
The previous version of the company's flagship database, Oracle 10g R2, came out in 2005, two years after the original version of Oracle Database 10g. The "g" in 10g and 11g stands for "grid," as in grid (or utility) computing. With 10g, Oracle introduced the feature that it refers to as Real Application Clusters (RACs). These are a way to join servers running Oracle's database together to work on database queries in parallel (see Oracle Further Orchestrates Its SOA Forays). According to Oracle, about half of its database customers have upgraded to 10g, with a fraction using RAC grids.
Among 11g features that Oracle hopes will attract more users to its grid computing systems are Oracle Real Application Testing and Oracle Data Guard. These features allow the splitting of grids to permit the testing of upgrades or system changes before moving them into production, as well as to facilitate backup and disaster recovery. Storage improvements in the latest release include automated data partitioning, better data compression, a feature for backing out of delinquent transactions, and the Oracle Total Recall capability. Oracle Total Recall allows administrators to run queries against the data as it stood at a specified point in the past. Finally, Oracle Database 11g allows native integration with the Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 development tool set, which was done with the hope of attracting Microsoft partners.
Until recently, Oracle’s research and development (R&D) emphasis has been on performance and scalability (i.e., customer satisfaction and product quality) rather than price and ease-of-use for the masses. The company remains the overall database market share leader, and it now insists that, after years of playing and trying, it has finally gotten the ease-of-use (employee productivity) and packaging formula (i.e., a better solution value—more features for lower cost) established, and it is ready to make a renewed push to small businesses. In fact, Oracle touts many recent benchmarks that purport its leadership in database performance and value, such as that Oracle Database 10g is 45 percent faster and 14 percent cheaper than Microsoft SQL Server 2005.
According to the Transaction Processing Performance Council (www.tpc.org), the Oracle database is also the price and performance leader in the TPC-C online transaction processing (OLTP) performance benchmark and the TPC-H data warehouse performance benchmark. Also, Oracle Database 10g Standard Edition One comes cheaper than Microsoft SQL Server 2005 SE, in terms of both the number of users and the number of sockets. Given that the database is also tightly integrated with Microsoft Windows, Oracle also touts a better (i.e., lesser) price and performance figure on that operating system too.
The typical problem with non-Oracle databases is when a small customer calls and asks the resellers for a small server to build a database. The straightforward solution is to sell the customer a two-way server with a standard Microsoft SQL Server database. Six months later, the same customer might call again and ask for a little more horsepower, in which case the reseller will offer a four-way server and more standard SQL Server software. However, some time down the road, when the customer’s business is really booming and it could use even more horsepower, a dead end appears in terms of a more scalable offering.
Conversely, the Oracle alternative is to sell this customer a two-way server from Hewlett-Packard (HP) with Oracle Database 10g Standard Edition One. Several months later, that solution is still working great, but the company could use a little more horsepower. The Oracle reseller now has the following options:
0 comments:
Post a Comment