Oracle tops IDC 2002 application service provider leadership grid

Oracle, the largest enterprise software company, today announced that leading IT market research firm IDC has named Oracle Corporation a market leader in its 2002 enterprise application software as a service leadership grid. In IDC`s recent evaluation of 13 application service providers (ASPs), Oracle Outsourcing took a leadership position, appearing in the upper-right-hand quadrant of the 2002 leadership grid.

In the bulletin entitled "Worldwide Enterprise Application Software as a Service Competitive Analysis: 2002 Leadership Grid,"(IDC #27484) IDC analysts Amy Mizoras and Jessica Goepfert examined the ASP market and vendor performance for 2002. Leadership qualities were evaluated based on two factors: "ability to gain share" of future markets and "opportunity alignment," the ability to meet current market demands. In both categories, Oracle emerged in the leadership position, demonstrating its commitment to the enterprise ASP space and providing a robust service with its offering, Oracle Outsourcing.

"In our outsourcing business we have invested heavily in helping our E-Business Suite customers lower costs, improve service and accelerate the time for them to get the business benefits of the applications," said Timothy Chou, president, Oracle Outsourcing.

"As a result, customers are not only seeing the benefits of outsourcing their applications in cost and quality of service, but more significantly it allows them to focus on their core business instead of IT management."

According to IDC, Oracle`s strengths lie in the company`s focus on delivering both enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM) applications as a hosted service, and the company`s management support led by key advocate, CEO Larry Ellison. "The strong support of Oracle`s management team ensures that the outsourcing division will have the resources to grow," said Mizoras. "Another Oracle strength is its focus on providing its own suite of online applications for small to large companies."

Additional key benefits of Oracle Outsourcing include rapid return-on-investment and exceptional customer service. Oracle estimates that customers who outsource their software can save more than 75% on labour cost, and Oracle works to ensure customer satisfaction and has offered discounted hosting fees if a customer is not satisfied for any reason during a given month.

Oracle Outsourcing

Oracle Corporation has been proving its Oracle E-Business Suite applications online through Oracle Outsourcing since 1999. Oracle E-Business Suite Outsourcing includes the most complete, integrated, Internet-based suite of more than 100 enterprise applications. Building on the three-year success of hosting its applications suite, Oracle recently announced Oracle Technology Outsourcing, extending its service, support and education expertise to the industry-leading technology products - Oracle9i Database and Oracle9i Application Server.