Oracle and HP target SMBs in Asia
SINGAPORE--Oracle and Hewlett-Packard (HP) have announced plans to jointly offer bundled hardware and software targeted at small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) in the Asia-Pacific region.
Designed for companies with between 25 and 200 employees, the bundles are a combination of Oracle applications on HP server and storage hardware.
The bundle packages will give customers access to Oracle's applications--E-Business Suite and JD Edwards EnterpriseOne--and HP's BladeSystem c3000, StorageWorks range and ProLiant and Integrity line of servers.
The vendors are also offering a database-server bundle targeted at midsize businesses. It combines the Oracle Database Standard Edition, a small footprint database, with HP's entry-level rx2600 server designed in Singapore.
Adrian Johnston, Oracle Asia-Pacific vice president of applications, said in a briefing today that the offerings address the typical limitations faced by SMBs, which are budget constraints and lack of in-house technical support.
"SMBs don't have the luxury of testing something out and being able to have it fail. They also cannot wait two years for an implementation. They need their IT equipment to be up and running in six months, and moreover without failure," Johnston said.
The partnership is part of Oracle's Accelerate program, which packages applications for SMB customers.
Freddy Tan, vice president of commercial accounts, solution partners and alliances of HP Asia-Pacific and Japan, said the bundles are based on best practices.
"It's like learning from the experiences of bigger companies. The bundles come from a history of what works and what doesn't, so we can minimize risk in an SMB," Tan noted.
The vendors are expecting a positive market response to these bundle offerings in China, Japan and India, as well as the smaller Asian markets.
"Places like Vietnam and the Philippines are starting to see big growth in the midmarkets, such as the huge midmarket manufacturing presence in Vietnam. These countries are beginning to realize they can no longer just manage on paper, and are beginning to automate in a big way," said Johnston.