In Oracle's first fiscal quarter 2006, thousands of new SMEs adopted Oracle technology. These are companies that had not bought anything from Oracle in the previous three years and between 50 percent and 60 percent of Oracle's SME revenue came from new customers in that period. In some countries, such as Italy, revenue from new customers made up as much as 92 percent of Oracle's SME revenue.

"Oracle has a reputation for the reliability and sophistication of its technology but it's less well known that Oracle is also now cheaper than Microsoft," says Niels Poulsen Stenfeldt, Director, SME Sales, Oracle Corporation, EMEA. "ISVs developing for the SME market can benefit from the reliability and advanced features of Oracle's technology, as well as the growing brand recognition of and momentum towards Oracle among SMEs."

Last quarter, Oracle launched Oracle Application Server Standard Edition One, an aggressively priced version of Oracle's leading application server that is designed to meet the needs of smaller organisations. Alongside Oracle Database Standard Edition One and Oracle E-Business Suite Special Edition, this release means Oracle's entire stack is now available and affordable for SME organisations.

The rapid take-up of Oracle in the SME market is being driven by Oracle's sales organisation. "By the start of this fiscal year we established eight new SME centres across Europe where we have 350 people working exclusively on outbound demand generation in the SME market for partners," says Stenfeldt, who was responsible for setting up the eight centres. Oracle does not sell directly to SMEs: All sales leads are passed on to Oracle partners, although Oracle is on hand to help close the deal where appropriate.

Oracle has also compiled a midmarket solutions catalogue to promote partner solutions to SMEs. More than 1400 partners have contributed details on more than 4200 solutions. About 5700 copies of the catalogue have been distributed on CD ROM and nearly 5000 people have searched it at Oracle's new SME Network portal. This website provides a one-stop resource for smaller organisations, combining a comprehensive solutions catalogue with independent news and tutorials. The site has already delivered nearly 3000 white paper downloads and has more than 5300 registered users.

Partner solutions and the solutions catalogue have been promoted through an extensive online, e-direct mail and telemarketing campaign including 100,000 calls and 600,000 emails. Oracle has placed more than 3.7 million advertisement impressions on midmarket websites to increase awareness among key IT decision makers. As a result, thousands of SME sales leads a month are being passed on to Oracle partners.

More and more ISVs that develop SME applications are switching to Oracle. In the last fiscal year, more than 1700 ISVs migrated to Oracle, most of them switching from Microsoft.