Israel offers one of the strongest concentrations of hi-tech companies anywhere outside of California's Silicon Valley and the local ISV community boasts many high profile globally respected names, such as Amdocs, Mercury, Comverse and ECI. Perhaps here more than anywhere else in the world ISVs play a key part in Oracle's success, accounting for approximately 35% of Oracle Israel's revenue. We spoke to Yuval Sivroni, director ISV division, Oracle Israel to find out more about the local ISV landscape.

ISV News: What are your job responsibilities within Oracle Israel?
Yuval Sivroni: In Oracle Israel 35% of the revenue is derived from ISVs, it's higher than every other country worldwide. So in our division a major part of the everyday work is selling product licences. I have been a senior member of Oracle Israel's management team for the last ten years. I have a team of sales managers and technology experts who work with me, and we also manage a very skilled network of technology specialists outside of Oracle Israel, our partners that deliver services to the ISVs.

ISVN: What is your experience in dealing with partners?
YS: We start working with them when they are raising funds for their company from venture capitalists and the government, we try to locate them at that phase. Most of the time they come to us because they know Oracle. At this early stage we partner with them, starting from the idea of the product, the design, even brainstorming about potential markets and then all the tech design and development and QA. We try to work with them in a very intimate approach throughout the development cycle and later on so it's a very long term relationship. Oracle Israel is ten years old, I've been here since the day it was established and many of our ISVs have been working with us for that long.

ISVN: How do you reach out to ISVs in Israel?
YS: First we are trying to be famous enough that they will reach us. When they think about technology, databases, application servers, we hope they will be aware of the Oracle brand and contact us. But we are not relying on that, we have several channels to get in touch with them. One is through the venture capitalists, every potential new ISV needs to raise money, so the VCs know about us and they bring us together. We also have contact with the government, a lot of new startups go to the government and we have this relationship. We have a very strong relationship with the hardware vendors, HP Sun, IBM in terms of hardware and when a new startup is buying a server we can reach them that way.

ISVN: What is driving the take-up of Oracle products in Israel?
YS: I would say the most important issue for ISVs is to be independent of the hardware platform and operating system. Because if they are going to develop a solution and market it worldwide, they cannot be sure what platform or OS the end customer will prefer, some of them prefer Unix, some Linux and some Microsoft. So the most important issue is that they need to be as independent as possible so as not to limit their potential sales. We try to explain this to them at the beginning, that we believe in independence. Of all the major ISVs in Israel, 80% are working with Oracle and many of these new entrepreneurs are coming from these established companies, so they have Oracle knowledge. We have competition, but we are very strong in terms of technology experts and experience in different ISVs, as well as offering very strong platform independence, this is what positions us in Israel.

ISVN: In what ways is Oracle Israel helping local ISVs to grow their business?
YS: In the business area we have a large range of solutions. We have great knowledge of the market's needs, from both the ISV and the end user perspective. We help our partners to deliver the best-fitting solution for the vertical market and in many cases the end user. Another aspect comes from being an international company and in many cases we open doors to Oracle representatives worldwide that assist in pushing the Oracle-based solution to the end user. Another important business benefit comes from Oracle business practice that encourages ISVs and gives them the best price/performance ratio possible.

In the contract area we assist ISVs with RFPs and provide technical and service answer to their needs. If an ISV needs a high-availability solution, we have a variety of technical options, if they need to start small and grow, the Real Application Clusters fits like a glove and if they need to answer a tough SLA then Oracle support will cover them towards the end user.

Another business solution is from the ISV professional services point of view. In that area we help them wrap the infrastructure within their product, develop a self-managed and remote mastered solution, we assist with sizing, benchmarks and much more.

ISVN: Have you implemented any local initiatives aimed at ISVs?
YS: Every year we take the leading technologies we see for that year and introduce them to our ISVs with lectures, hands-on sessions and on-site consulting. Some of the technologies in the past few years were RAC, J2EE, Toplink, Enterprise Manager and reporting capabilities. This year without a doubt we will deal with SOA orchestration, BPEL and Workflow. These are the next generation solutions for ISVs, especially in the Telco industry.

Another need we react to is for specific technical briefings. For that we have two initiatives: Every Tuesday we have sessions where we drill down into a different technology subject. For instance - managing backups with Oracle RMAN. For specific company needs we have technology days organised by our specialists along with the leading ISV technologists. Of course, all these initiatives are free of charge and meant to increase the partner knowledge.

Another initiative we have is migration to Oracle from alternative platforms. This year alone we migrated two ISVs from Informix, three from Sybase, two from MySQL and five from MS-SQL, two from BEA Weblogic and even one from Jboss and one from .Net. We have a complete migration program that include all aspects - design, database migration, application migration, Oracle specific improvements, QA and most importantly - education and knowledge transfer.

ISVN: How would you summarise the benefits that ISVs can gain from working with Oracle Israel?
YS: In one sentence - not only do we help our ISVs to implement the best technology available, we also bring them the most cost-effective deal. Adding to the triangle our support and service, we have a package ISVs can't refuse!

ISVN: Whom should an ISV contact if they were interested in working with you?
YS: yuval.sivroni@oracle.com