Having announced Oracle Business Accelerator for the SMB segment, the company has recently appointed Redington as its Value-added distributor, revealed Roy. Excerpts from the interview

Oracle has announced to deploy solution for the small and medium business. Please elaborate. Do you think that this is the right time to develop product for SMB segment?
Out of the array of products which we are selling to the mid market, we have Oracle Business Accelerator, OBA in short. This is a structured configuration tool-based implementation methodology and is a industry driven product.

Oracle Accelerate solutions provide industry-tailored solutions that are packaged, priced and delivered by partners and specifically designed to be easily managed by the mid-size companies.

The key differentiator in this solution is that whole configuration tool is based outside the system. It is a question and answer-based guided methodology of configuration. For example, we ask questions, the particular customer or the particular person who is trying to set up systems like about their credit terms or buying cycle or about the location of their inventory. It is a simple methodical English-driven question and answer and we ask our customers to respond to them.

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 are installed. For example, if we close the deal today, tomorrow the implementation person can start going through Q&A sheet and it then goes and gets configured in the system.

This is the right time for the partners to implement the solution because they get the solution which has high value addition and this is the time when they can invest on the solution.

Samik Roy Head-Commercial Applications Business, Oracle India

So what are the advantages that your customers and partners will get out of this?
One of the biggest advantages that partner 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. It is very unlikely in normal process because normally one has to wait for the software and hardware to get installed and then wait for the configuration directly.

It is simple to use. It lowers cost and increases margins and the RoI for the partners and customers is also high. It basically decreases baseline confi­guration by 50 to 75 percent. We had a customer where implementation of the project went live in 32 days and this is the benefit that the customer and partner is getting. Once the configura­tion is done, there are things like integration, data migration, report switching which happens outside the OBA. Overall, the total time of implementation is brought down by 25-40 percent which is a considerable saving for any organization.

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

Depending on the kind of industry and the kind of practice, we have different industry tools and we use them for particular business purpose.

To elaborate on the same, we executed project for Wipro e-peripherals where half of the project was done under an OBA-based implementation and the other half was done without using the OBA configuration tool. The one with OBA implementation tool went live in 40 days and the one without OBA went live in about three months. So there is a qualitative difference. Thats the way it is implemented and and there is a huge difference.

What is your channel model for the distribution of this product?
We have appointed Redington as our value-added distributor. Under Redington we have tier-2 partners. Under them, we have resellers and OBA specific implementor partners who can do reselling of licenses and the implementation as well.

We have 115 resellers who reach across the country and sell this product. With the support of the distributors and the resellers we have increased our reach. 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 lot of bundles. What we have done is that to ease the process, we have different bundles. So if someone wants basic HR, we have a HR bundle or if a person wants a basic ERP like order management, procurement and financial tools, we have separate tool for that.

Amrita Tejasvi
amritat@cybermedia.co.in

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