We have an array of products for the mid market

Samik Roy, head, commercial applications business, Oracle India, in an interview with Amrita Tejasvi of Cybermedia shares details on Oracle's business initiatives for the small and medium businesses.

 

Oracle has announced that it will deploy solution for small and medium businesses. Please elaborate?

Out of the array of products which we are selling to the mid market, we have oracle business accelerator (OBA). This is a structured configuration tool based implementation methodology, and is an industry-driven product. The key differentiator in this solution is that the whole configuration tool is based outside the system. It is a question and answer based guided methodology of configuration. It is not required to have a hardware or a software in place. One can start the system even before the hardware or software are installed. This is the right time for the partners to implement the solution, because it has high value addition.

What advantages your customers and partners will get out of this?

One of the biggest advantages that partners and customers get is the time saving. By the time hardware and software comes, and software gets installed; you are already ready with the configuration step, and you just have to wait for implementation.

Also, it is simple to use. It lowers costs, increases margins, and the RoI for partners and customers is also high. It basically decreases baseline configuration by 50-75 per cent. Once configuration is done; there are things like integration, data migration, report switching, which happens outside OBA. Overall, total time of implementation is brought down by 25-40 per cent.

At the same time, this is industry specific. The procurement in a manufacturing industry may be different from procurement for financial services; and is different from the procurement in telecom services. So we have different applications for different verticals.

What is your channel model for distribution of this product?

We have appointed Redington as our value added distributor. Under Redington we have tier-2 partners, who have resellers and OBA specific implementor partners underthem. We have 115 resellers in the country. We have OBA certified partners, that ensure that partners are qualified to implement the solution.

What is the scope of value addition in this segment?

For the mid market, we have created a lot of bundles. To ease the process, we have different bundles. So if someone wants basic HR, we have an HR bundle; or if a person wants basic ERP like order management, procurement, and financial tools, we have a separate tool for that.