"Oracle has long been a trusted partner for small and medium businesses, and we have developed a wealth of knowledge to help facilitate the unique needs of that market," said Oracle President Charles Phillips. "The introduction of Oracle Accelerate expands on our experience in this market, and makes it faster and easier for customers and partners to leverage Oracle's leading enterprise applications."

Comprehensive Product and Industry Bundles
Key to Oracle Accelerate is the availability of pre-packed application bundles that can be rapidly implemented and provide a wide range of industry-specific functionality. Working with the partner community, Oracle has identified 80 product and industry-specific bundles that can help companies quickly take advantage of Oracle's enterprise applications, without sacrificing flexibility and functionality. The product bundles deliver comprehensive business flows, across front office, back office and industry-specific processes. The bundles can be extended by partners to meet specific industry requirements.

Oracle Business Accelerators Deliver Rapid, Effective Implementations
Oracle's rapid implementation tools--Oracle Business Accelerators--are a key component of the Oracle Accelerate program. Oracle Business Accelerators feature an automated setup tool that configures end-to-end business flows to decrease cost, risk and implementation time. The setup tool captures responses to simple questions about specific business requirements and then automatically applies that information to the application implementation. Once a customer has completed the set-up questionnaire, a new instance can be up and running in hours.

Established Parnter Network Extends Value of Oracle Accelerate
Oracle provides partners with valuable tools to help ensure their success. New guided learning path and assessment tests, available through the Oracle PartnerNetwork portal, offer self-paced education courses for partners to become trained on a wide range of Oracle products. Partners can easily become proficient in how to execute an Oracle Business Accelerators implementation using Oracle’s guided learning paths, allowing them to provide extended services to their customers.

Additionally, Oracle provides extensive pre-sales support for partners and has recently doubled its joint demand generation and marketing program budget. To facilitate partner involvement in Oracle Accelerate, Oracle has expanded the SMB content available on the Oracle PartnerNetwork portal. This new SMB-specific content provides partners with valuable resources used by Oracle’s own direct sales team, ensuring that partners are equipped with the up-to-date tools to sell Oracle software and effectively compete in the SMB space. Links to customer presentations, product positioning documentation, sales kits and specialized training are designed to help partners understand the unique messaging, positioning, products and strategies for selling Oracle products into this market.

Finally, Oracle is establishing regional SMB Solution Centers throughout the world to showcase the Oracle Accelerate offerings and to bring partners into the sales cycle.

SMB Applications Business Unit
To help ensure the success of the Oracle Accelerate program, Oracle has developed a global business unit that will manage and monitor the product and partner components of the program. Headed by Senior Vice President Tony Kender, the SMB business unit will maintain a world-class partner/reseller ecosystem, drive the continued development of product and industry bundles and work to ensure SMB customer success.

"Our goal is simple: to become the #1 provider of applications to small and medium businesses," said Kender. "With Oracle Accelerate we are aligning Oracle's proven applications and rapid implementation tools with our partner's industry solutions under a single package. We have doubled our SMB marketing program budget and added a dozen new SMB-focused executives around the world."

For more information, please visit Oracle.com/accelerate.

About Oracle
Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL) is the world's largest enterprise software company. For more information about Oracle please visit www.oracle.com.

The above is intended to outline our general product direction. It is intended for information purposes only, and may not be incorporated into any contract. It is not a commitment to deliver any material, code, or functionality, and should not be relied upon in making purchasing decisions. The development, release, and timing of any features or functionality described for Oracle’s products remains at the sole discretion of Oracle.