Announced at its OpenWorld event in October 2006, Accelerate offered certified partners the opportunity to buy pre-packaged application bundles that included application modules plus its rapid implementation Business Accelerator software and other tools, in a bid to make its easier to sell to the SMB market. The company is now ramping up the program with new resources and new pricing discounts.
Each of Oracle’s four application suites – Oracle, Peoplesoft, JD Edwards and Siebel – is included. Oracle will package the applications plus implementation methodologies, best practice, business process flows and rapid deployment tools. Partners can select the specific modules they want then add their own industry-specific customizations and services, selling the results as an Oracle-approved bundle.
The most significant new features of Accelerate are a discounted SMB pricing model and flexibility when bundling modules, which will enable partners to offer enterprise-level software at a more affordable price. Other additions include an Accelerate Solutions Catalog to showcase Accelerate bundles on the Oracle PartnerNetwork, further help with campaigns, a referral fee program and a partner loyalty program.
Oracle is pushing the verticalization aspect heavily, having stressed at its recent Applications Unlimited launch that it believes the future lies in vertical applications. In offering financial incentives and relying on its partners to develop industry-specific software and service offerings for the SMB sector it is following the path taken by Microsoft Business Solutions and more recently SAP AG.
The move to accelerate the Accelerate program comes a couple of weeks after SAP announced that it was accelerating its own SMB efforts. The vendors are employing different strategies however, albeit it driven out of their respective recently created global SMB business units.
Oracle is pushing modified existing enterprise-level applications to SMB’s via the partner network and hoping to capitalize on the ability of the applications to scale in terms of functionality as well as user numbers as the user organization grows.
SAP’s go-to-market strategy is based around three applications – All-in-One, BusinessOne and the proposed and newly designed A1S SaaS-friendly alternative, all of which are separate applications with different code bases. The A1S application and business model will be the beneficiary of heavy investment over the next two years as SAP intensifies its SMB efforts.
SAP believes the A1S product has the potential to pull in 10,000 new SMB customers per year, which is a level of customer potential acquisition that Oracle cannot afford to ignore.
