Oracle Systems Corp, Redwood Shores, California has embarked on a big push of its applications products, saying by next year it expects them to account for as much as 30% of the company’s revenues. It has launched a new version of its Oracle Co-operative Applications suite – incorporating modules for accounting, manufacturing, and personnel, with sales and marketing to be added later this year – and has opened up the applications programming interfaces to third parties. Oracle says it’s the first vendor in the world to license the programming interfaces to its packaged software to third parties (if you were Microsoft Corp, would you sue?), and has signed up a series of developers to support it. The software runs under most versions of Unix, under VMS and some mainframe operating systems. According to Dave O’Connor, Oracle’s applications marketing manager, the company hopes to make greater inroads particularly into the process manufacturing sector, where it currently addresses only part of the market. The main concept is the recognition that as an organisation we can’t provide a total solution, he said. So far, Oracle has signed up 19 partners, including Datalogix International Inc, EDI Solutions Inc, SHL Systemhouse Ltd and Clarify Inc. They will be given access to Oracle’s customer base and marketing resources perhaps the main point for Oracle is that the partners will also resell Oracle applications.