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By Harichandan A. A.
These companies would have to spend about Rs. 3.3 lakhs for "one named user and a compulsory minimum of five licensed users," to buy the suite. Computer maker and IT services and consulting giant IBM announced its own small and medium business (SMB) offering recently. IBM wants to sell Thinkpad notebooks, Thinkcentre desktops, Internet infrastructure software Websphere and database software DB2, all under a brand called Express. IBM's definition of SMB would be a relatively large cooperative bank. Managing Director, Abraham Thomas, said some nationalised banks would fit the bill as well. The company was spending $200 million on a `global ad campaign' to promote Express. Oracle's strategy was not different from when it first came to India — look for partners who have the reach in the local market, and make good deals with them. This time it would be "100 per cent partnership oriented" said Oracle's Suresh Kalpathy, Divisional Director, SME Business, APac Region. Oracle's own direct selling agents would continue to concentrate on the (large) enterprises, while the partners — GTL, Satyam and Sonata — would work on the SMEs. India, Australia, and `of course China' were exciting regions, with concentrations of different gradations of SMEs, in terms of revenues. In its SME friendly avatar, Oracle was running a pilot project in China to test the waters, he said. The company's SME strategy was about a year old and sales had started in India `only in August'. Oracle planned to take its SME campaign to eight APac countries, and in India garner 25 per cent of the 3500, in the next two to three years. For IBM, the U.S. would continue to be the primary market, though the `company in 130 countries' was not unaware of growing domestic power already strong in China, and growing fast in India.
Tough competition
In the market are smaller, but tenacious and innovative competitors, who have taken the game into the MNCs' home turf, the American market. For example, iCode, the Bangalore based RDBMS (Relational Database Management System) package vendor has an "award winning ERP solution tailor made for small companies, with 2500 clients in 30 countries". But the game has just begun, and selling a product is only one part of it, as deep pockets do count.
Linux impact
For long, Oracle was viewed as a license-heavy player requiring platforms such as the Sun-Solaris, and operating systems such as Unix. That story was over, with Linux and open source software making an operating system accessible to even those companies who were happy with just a Microsoft Access. Mr. Kalpathy agrees. "The Intel-Linux option works out at a third of the Sun-Solaris system," he said. Yet, Oracle's target SMEs must have a certain volume of business to justify the investment needed to buy its database. Support and services will also cost money. Target companies may find the MNC name a deterrent and instead choose the comfort of home grown solutions from an alive and kicking so called unorganised vendor segment. One such vendor even boasted of a client-win at the closing press conference of the latest IT.Com. Finally their own sizes mandate that Oracle or IBM continue to go after large clients. Mr. Abraham, however says, his company wants to be in all segments, and that "today's large companies were small yesterday".
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