Responding to strong interest from independent software vendors (ISVs), Oracle announced a series of seminars on Oracle Database 10g and Oracle Fusion Middleware 10g specifically tailored to the ISV community. Beginning in North America and moving into the EMEA, LAD and APAC regions in 2006, the sessions are designed to provide ISVs with the knowledge and skills they need to utilize Oracle technology, with content ranging from high-level overviews to in-depth technical training sessions.

The Oracle Fusion Middleware family of products provides a significant revenue opportunity for Oracle partners -- with indirect revenue accounting for 41 percent of the platform's revenue during the last fiscal year. The integrated, comprehensive offerings are standards-based and provide ISVs with cost-effective, scalable, flexible and secure solutions. This provides ISVs with the agility needed for developing differentiated applications on Oracle Fusion Middleware 10g that respond to the complex challenges of a customer's security, regulatory, industry and business needs. Thousands of ISVs around the world have already certified and support Oracle Fusion Middleware 10g and several have migrated from other application servers. Oracle Fusion Middleware 10g is also certified with Oracle E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft and JD Edwards Enterprise Applications -- making it easy for ISVs to integrate with Oracle's business applications using a common, standards-based architecture and middleware platform.

Oracle Database 10g is the industry's only database designed for Grid computing, delivering scalability, availability, security and ease of management on a low-cost Grid of industry standard servers and storage. ISVs are using Oracle Database 10g to extend their solution footprint including identity provisioning, seamless data encryption, ease of scalability and high availability across all development environments and operating system platforms.

CTOs, product management, marketing and business professionals will benefit from a free two-hour strategy briefing that will explain how ISVs can build service-oriented applications with Oracle Database 10g and Oracle Fusion Middleware 10g to streamline and optimize business and IT processes. ISVs will also learn how to grow and build a business on Oracle technology and about the key principles of Oracle Fusion Middleware: business intelligence, industry standards, Service-Oriented Architecture, best-of-the-best functionality and a superior ownership experience.

Developers, middleware architects, and database administrators can attend one day, in-depth technical briefings on Oracle Database 10g -- including Oracle Real Application Clusters -- or Oracle Fusion Middleware software. During the sessions, Oracle experts will discuss the benefits of upgrading to Oracle Database 10g, migrating applications from other databases to Oracle, and how to package Oracle Database 10g with other vendor applications. The seminars will educate ISVs on how to improve reliability and availability of applications while reducing the costs of deployment by using Oracle Database. ISVs will learn how to use Oracle technical resources available exclusively only to ISVs.

Oracle experts also will explain how the family of proven middleware software products help organizations achieve greater agility, make better-informed business decisions and more easily integrate data and processes across disparate IT systems, including technologies from Oracle and other vendors. ISVs will learn how to build web-enabled service-oriented applications, integrate data and business processes, automate multi-stop business processes, and provide real-time business insight by analyzing key performance indicators.

"Agile has always received excellent ISV support from Oracle," said Chris Wong, executive vice president of Agile Corp. "The ISV seminar series is another indication that Oracle is committed to helping ISVs adopt Oracle technology."

"Through our relationship with Oracle, Bottomline is able to bring to market payments automation solutions that leverage full performance capabilities of Oracle Database 10g while reducing the total cost of ownership for our customers," said Chip Martin, vice president of product management for Bottomline Technologies, an Oracle Certified Partner. "This new seminar series provides an ongoing educational opportunity for Bottomline to determine how to best leverage and integrate Oracle infrastructure to deliver even greater value to our customers."

"We found the Oracle ISV technical training seminars to be well worth attending," said John Swallow, primary engineer for Waters Corp. "The information is succinctly transferred and the presenters were very responsive to our needs and questions."