As Published In May 2004

E-Business News
By Marta Bright, Kristin Lahmeyer Drees, Caroline Kvitka, Aaron Lazenby, Katheryn Potterf, and Fred Sandsmark

Monitoring the Pulse of Small and Midsize Enterprises

What keeps senior executives of small and midsize enterprises (SMEs) up at night hasn't changed much since last year, according to a new Datamonitor study entitled "SME Business Issues in a Re-emergent Market." The study, based on 4,480 interviews with senior executives in 19 European and Middle Eastern countries, shows that despite last year's upturn in global economic conditions, many SMEs continue to face significant business challenges.

Reducing operating costs and becoming more competitive remain the overriding concerns (cited by 53 percent). Other business imperatives for 2004 are as follows: achieving a more consistent IT environment (34 percent), improving internal collaboration (34 percent), improving business intelligence and management information (24 percent), improving external collaboration (18 percent), increasing sales and market share (17 percent), and complying with industry standards and legislation (13 percent).

What are some of the next steps proposed for SMEs?

• Consolidate IT platforms, where appropriate, in conjunction with any hardware and software replacement.
• Investigate discounted outsourcing opportunities for IT in support of core operational business processes.
• Implement collaboration software to improve communication and business-process efficiency between departments and sites or for remote workers.
• Overhaul CRM operations, while tying any investment to the need for business intelligence throughout the organization, not just for C-level reporting.
• Overhaul core IT and focus on clear ROI. When your company is buying IT off the shelf, look for each stage to create savings that might justify the next stage.

For a copy of the Datamonitor study, published in February 2004, please go to oracle.com/start and enter the keyword EMEASME.

Partner News

Intermec Delivers RFID Products
Intermec Technologies Corporation, an Oracle Certified Advantage Partner, is bringing its radio frequency identification (RFID) data collection devices to the warehouse, supply chain, and field service industry.

"We have created Oracle-ready devices, so an Intermec customer just needs to ask us for an Oracle-ready warehouse management system, supply chain, or field service product, and it comes preloaded with Oracle," explains Keith Hall, Intermec's global alliance manager. The devices can read from and write to RFID tags and send the collected data to the Oracle database or applications.

Although much of the buzz around RFID is centered on consumer goods—largely spurred by Wal-Mart—Hall points out that there are many vital but less glamorous uses for RFID today in closed-loop supply chains.

By embedding Intermec's RFID technology in the Oracle application server and database, Intermec is creating an infrastructure product upon which other Oracle partners can develop custom solutions. "It's important for us to have an infrastructure product that can play to Oracle's customer base," Hall says.

Oracle On Demand Opens Partner Opportunities

Since Oracle first outsourced an implementation of Oracle E-Business Suite, in 1999, on-demand, hosted services has become the company's fastest-growing business. More than 250,000 end users in more than 25 countries now employ Oracle software through a variety of on-demand models.

More than two-thirds of Oracle's on-demand implementations are done with partners. As hosted services grows into a multibillion-dollar business for Oracle, opportunities for partners grow too.

This spring those opportunities expanded via the Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN) E-Business Suite Implementer initiative. Available to qualified partners, the initiative provides training, assessment, reference guides, information on the on-demand life-cycle, and more.

Partners providing Oracle on-demand implementations must undergo rigorous training to ensure that they deliver a high level of customer service and satisfaction. Training is based on lessons Oracle and its earliest outsourcing partners learned over the last five years, including CEMLI (customization, extension, modification, localization, and integration) standards designed to ensure that complex applications can be successfully migrated to a hosted environment and maintained there.