With a world-famous financial services sector, Switzerland is fertile ground for ISVs to exploit the numerous opportunities offered by this lucrative business. And with three national languages there are plenty of areas for ISVs to carve out profitable niches even in this relatively small country. We talk to Pier Paolo Battolla, ISV manager for Switzerland, who explains how Oracle works with its partners in this complex environment.

ISV News: What are your job responsibilities within Oracle Switzerland?
Pier Paolo Battolla: As part of the country management team I am responsible for alliance and channel in Switzerland. It's my job to find ways to better align with our ISV partners to help them deliver better value to the end customers.

ISV News: What is your experience of working with partners?
PPB: I have only been in this role for one year, but before that I was running Oracle Financial Services in Switzerland and was involved in various deals with ISV partners. This past year has been one of learning - discovering what is working, what isn't working and how we can improve the way we work with our partners,

ISV News: How is the Swiss Alliance and Channel function organised in relation to ISVs?
PPB: An important point about Switzerland is that we have three main languages, German (70%), French (25%) and Italian (5%). We have channel managers for each of the language territories and these in turn are separated into application and technology partners. The field channel managers work with the larger ISVs and we have a French speaking telesales team based in Potsdam which deals with our smaller partners.

ISV News: How would you characterise the ISV landscape in Switzerland?
PPB: Banking is an important industry here and so ISVs working in the financial services sector are a big market for us. They focus on various different segments of the market, such as core banking, portfolio management, payment and transaction processing, etc.

Outside of banking we also have ISVs who focus on sectors such as healthcare and ERP. The way we want to work with ISVs is to give them somebody who is able to understand their business, so I have people who are managing the ISV's according to their industry sectors. That way we can have a community of partners who are managed by people who know and understand the industry they primarily work in.

ISV News: How do you reach out to ISVs in Switzerland?
PPB: We had a large number of ISVs who were Oracle partners but not very active, and we have others that are more active and some that are not working with us at all. We have segmented the markets that these companies work in and focused our efforts on different industries, trying to raise interest in our technologies. We try to bring them in by promoting migration to our products through our technical services, and by putting together business plans where we aid the migration process with marketing campaigns and sales strategies to really deliver an added value that the other vendors cannot provide.

ISV News: What is driving the take up of Oracle products in Switzerland?
PPB: In financial services we have been very active in establishing Oracle technology as being the platform standard in that industry. This started in around 1999 and has been very strong with people moving away from mainframes and IBM so that now in the financial services sector Oracle is a must. The financial industry has decided that if somebody wants to provide them with a solution then it has to be based on Oracle. We push that hard and do our best to protect that market share.

ISV News: How does Oracle Switzerland help ISVs to grow their business?
PPB: A good example is the public sector where we positioned Oracle as a technology provider which was very strong and able to add value for customers in this market by providing the kind of competencies they need. This helped our ISV partners make inroads into this market, which would have been difficult for them to achieve without working with us.

ISV News: Have you implemented any local initiatives aimed at ISVs?
PPB: Because we traditionally focused on the larger enterprises, we had quite poor representation amongst small to medium businesses and we left a lot of space for Microsoft and IBM in the lower end of the market. We've been doing a lot of work in this area and have raised Oracle's profile considerably amongst the SMB community.

ISV News: How would you summarise the benefits that ISVs can gain from working with Oracle Switzerland?
PPB: We've been working with our ISVs to promote them in joint events and increase awareness of the solutions they offer, and we've also been investing a lot to help them with branding, telemarketing campaigns and those sorts of things. Working with Oracle gives ISVs access to market leading technology backed up by a dedicated commitment to forging strong relationships with our partners.

ISV News: Whom should an ISV contact if they were interested in working with you?
PPB: They can contact me personally on +41 22 791 51 66 or by email: pierpaolo.battolla@oracle.com.