As Oracle moves into its fiscal year 2006, we are stepping up our efforts even further to grow our business with our ISV community in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

In this issue of the newsletter we bring you news of the latest Oracle technologies and services to help you deploy your solutions on the best database and middleware available and to expand your range of products with complementary applications from Oracle. We also introduce some new team members in Oracle's EMEA ISV programme, who are all committed to ensuring our mutual success.

In this issue you will also find profiles of a number of vendors from around the region who are boosting profits and finding new markets through their partnership with Oracle; and we bring you news of events, tools and resources to help you start and build mutually profitable business with us.

I hope you find this issue of the ISV newsletter interesting and informative, and as ever, if you have any questions or comments, please don't hesitate to get in touch.

New Technologies for ISVs

This issue sees news of the launch of Oracle Database 10g Release 2, with new features that will make it even easier for ISVs and their customers to develop, maintain and deploy their applications.

We also bring you news that Oracle is now offering its JDeveloper Java development environment free to the developer community. Read the article to find out how you can benefit from its easy-to-use features for building SOA applications based on its rich functionality for web services, BPEL process flows, UML modelling and Portlets.

Meanwhile, if you are currently looking into offshoring some or all of your development efforts, Oracle and Kaioko have teamed up to offer you a free consultation before you begin. Find out more.

Oracle EMEA ISV Team Expands

With 4,731 ISVs now registered as Oracle partners in EMEA, and 40% of Oracle revenues coming through the ISV community, we are stepping up our commitment to the community by expanding the ISV management team in the EMEA region. This summer we welcome the appointments of Hartmuth Horny, Markus Reischl and Erwin Schiffner.

As our new ISV Program Director, Hartmuth will be responsible for increasing Oracle's ISV community in the EMEA region and helping existing partners to better understand the full range of Oracle solutions. Contact Hartmuth at hartmuth.horny@oracle.com.

As Team Account Manager, Markus's remit is to help strategic ISV partners expand their operations and markets across Europe and further afield, and will be working with partners to streamline account management and identify sales and partnering opportunities across the region. Contact Markus at markus.reischl@oracle.com.

Erwin, meanwhile, joins us as Director for Oracle's Embedded Software Licence business in EMEA, focused on identifying market needs, competition and partner best practices throughout the region. Contact Erwin at erwin.schiffner@oracle.com.

Spotlight on Successful Partnerships

This issue we turn the spotlight on a number of ISVs from different countries and industry sectors that are finding commercial success together with Oracle.

From the telecommunications sector, billing software vendor CSG talks to us about why Oracle proved to be a more profitable choice of database platform than Sybase.

In our Public Sector section, we talk to Germany's prodatis and Spain's Scytl about how they are addressing opportunities in local and regional government jointly with Oracle.

Our new Financial Services section profiles FRS, a vendor of financial analytics software based on Oracle's highly scalable, high-performing database.

Finally we hear from Consit in Denmark on the benefits of integrating with and reselling Oracle Applications, and Pro-Concept in Switzerland, which is finding new market opportunities reselling Oracle Collaboration Suite with its own solution