Oracle South Africa, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Oracle Corporation, has announced the appointment of two partners to provide hosting services for Oracle software to corporates and the mid-market.
The two partners, EDS and Telkom Business Integration Services, will offer infrastructure, hardware and network services to the business community based on the Oracle software suite - Oracle9i Database, Oracle9i Application Server and Oracle E-Business Suite.
According to Joe Heunes, director of support services at Oracle South Africa, the appointment of the two partners will pave the way for making Oracle software available to the broad business community in a number of formats to suit budgets and business requirements.
"Outsourcing of software is becoming an attractive option for businesses of all sizes for a number of reasons. By outsourcing, companies can budget for predictable IT costs, reduce the need for in-house IT skills, and invoke service levels that will suit their need for security and risk management.
"By appointing partners such as EDS and Telkom Business Integration Services, Oracle software is made available to a larger segment of the market, and the services delivered around the product can be tailored to suit individual business needs.
"EDS has built its business on managed IT environments, and the Oracle hosting service will be a valuable addition to their range of service offerings," says Heunes. "Telkom Business Integration Services is focusing on developing those markets which traditionally have not considered software outsourcing, particularly in the mid-market sector."
Heunes believes the appointment of partners and the delivery of application software in a hosted environment is the first step towards achieving a "software on demand" business model. "A large proportion of a company`s IT infrastructure can be outsourced in this way, simply because many of the applications run business systems that are procedural and routine. It is only the business-critical elements of IT that should stay in-house - those applications custom-developed to service very specific business needs that are key differentiators in the market."
IT research group, IDC conducted an examination of the market for enterprise application service provision and leading vendor performance for 2002 through 2006. The group puts Oracle Outsourcing, ahead of IBM, SAP and PeopleSoft in terms of both its ability to gain market share and to meet current market demands.
Among the company`s strengths, according to IDC, are management`s commitment to outsourcing and the company`s focus on delivering its ERP, CRM, business intelligence and supply chain management as outsourced online services.
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