Siemens Austria is one partner taking advantage of the Oracle Embedded Software Licence in making its products. This licence offers competitive pricing to ISVs that need a database or an application server to embed in their own products. It's based on a royalty model, where ISVs can pay 5 percent or 10 percent of the price of their own solution, or 20 percent of Oracle's list price.

"The Oracle Embedded Software Licence offers us a competitive price," says Walter Ozinger, vice president of communication solutions and services, Siemens Austria. "Our customers expect us to take responsibility for the whole solution we provide. The positive thing is that the Oracle licence enables us to take responsibility for the database as well, and we have some of our own people at customer sites to operate and maintain the system. We can cover any problems that arise, even if they are in Oracle itself. That's why it's the best fit for us."

Siemens has a family of products aimed at telecommunications companies in the prepaid and postpaid market. These include applications to support voucher production and recrediting of phones (VoMSXpress Voucher Management System), call centre applications to provide information on phone credit and usage (CHRISXpress Call History and Recharge Information System) and a solution that provides the same facilities as a private branch exchange (PBX) to cellphones so they can connect to each other (MCXpress Mobile Centrex solution). The company has 68 installations worldwide. The customers for these products are mainly mobile network operators.

An embedded Oracle Database is used for data storage in the applications and Siemens is now developing the next generation of its applications on Oracle Database 10g. Siemens expects to launch its new products in the middle of 2006.

"There is always demand for new features," says Ozinger. "Oracle Database 10g has outstanding features for us, which will help us to help our customers to grow in the market. We are in expanding markets in Indonesia and Asia among others and there is real demand for an expandable database. That's the reason we moved from 9i to 10g. We are also now supporting the grid in our software. Reliability features have always been there in Oracle Database, but it's constantly improving."

Oracle's brand recognition is one reason that Siemens works with Oracle. "Oracle can fulfil all our requirements and the requirements of our customers," adds Ozinger. "We have databases far bigger than 1TB in Indonesia and have some customers with small databases too. Oracle can scale to meet all their needs."

Siemens has a maintenance contract with Oracle and receives technical support. "We receive the best breed of support from our account manager at Oracle," says Ozinger. "He helps us in any situation and can help us find the right people at Oracle to talk to about anything. Siemens has over 5000 employees working on solutions and other parts of the company work with other database vendors. There is no other database vendor we get the same level of support from as we do from Oracle."

The company is now developing a new point of sale solution (called e.Pos electronic point of sales) which will enable people to recredit their phones at the till without using vouchers. The application will be based on Oracle Database 10g and the next generation of Siemens' own framework and will be launched in the middle of 2006.

Erwin Schiffner, director of embedded licensing Oracle EMEA, says: "The embedded software licence is available to all Oracle PartnerNetwork members, provided that the database and/or application server is truly embedded in the application with no access from other applications. The partner sells and supports the Oracle technology as an integral part of their own solution stack."

For more information on Oracle Embedded Software Licence, contact Erwin Schiffner (erwin.schiffner@oracle.com).