As Oracle's fiscal year 2006 gets underway, we are actively looking for new ISV partners in three specific departmental areas in the public sector: social services, tax and customs.

We believe that these three areas present a particularly significant market opportunity across Europe in the coming year. Western European governments have been leading the way in introducing major modernisation projects in social services, revenue collection and customs, and others are following suit.

Social services harmonisation across the European Union is leading many governments to overhaul their ageing systems to ensure that citizens can receive consistent services as they move among the member states. This calls for increased data sharing between governments, and streamlined applications and processes. There are opportunities for vendors who have heretofore been operating in just one country to move into new national markets.

In taxation, creaking mainframe-based systems are being replaced and tax departments are being merged to capitalise on cost-saving opportunities and improve internal efficiency. The EU e-government mandate is leading governments to improve citizen service, rolling out web-based self-service applications that enable citizens to pay taxes online. Entire tax systems are being replaced, creating a huge Europe-wide opportunity for software vendors with specialist applications for revenue collection and management.

Similar initiatives are taking place in customs operations, with an added emphasis on improving security.

How can Oracle help you?

Oracle is looking to partner with specialist software vendors to address the market opportunities in these three areas. While Oracle has an extensive footprint in the public sector for our database, middleware and ERP applications products, we do not develop our own niche applications for social services, tax and customs. As such, we can offer ISVs significant business advantages in terms of reselling our world-leading database and middleware technology platform and our extensive suite of horizontal applications.

Oracle can also help you to reduce your research and development costs by providing you with our Citizen Data Hub - a ready-made public sector data model that is used by the Oracle E-Business Suite and an increasing number of third-party public sector applications. The Citizen Data Hub ensures that your solution can share and synchronise data readily with Oracle E-Business Suite and third-party applications, sparing you the time and effort involved in creating your own APIs. Oracle Citizen Data Hub is based on the latest service-oriented architecture (SOA) technology.

Oracle can also help you expand your markets. We are a global vendor with a local presence in almost every country in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. We have a massive worldwide ecosystem of some 15,000 partners ranging from hardware vendors and systems integrators to distributors, resellers and hosting services providers. We actively help our strategic ISV partners to expand into new markets and to find complementary partners in those markets.

Oracle is also committed to supporting our ISV community by recommending your software to prospects as part of our public sector "industry footprint"; creating joint go-to-market plans with you; dedicating Oracle pre-sales and sales staff to joint tenders; placing our marketing, PR and telemarketing teams at your disposal, and involving you in sales initiatives, events, marketing campaigns and other activities.

If you are interested in finding out more about what Oracle has to offer, don't hesitate to contact your local Oracle PartnerNetwork Interaction Center, where Oracle's local representatives are empowered to recruit ISV partners for mutual business success.

I look forward very much to working with you.

Jens Mortensen
Vice President, Public Services, Oracle Europe, Middle East and Africa