Oracle: Database 11g not very important for resellers

Oracle unveiled the latest version of its enterprise-edition database yesterday, but the product isn’t likely to be huge news for most resellers and system integrators, according to the company’s president.

At a press conference following the Oracle Database 11g release in New York yesterday, Oracle’s president Charles Phillips fielded a question about channel partners’ roles in selling the Oracle enterprise database.

“The way it works is today the channel, at least for the [high-volume] distributors, [is] mainly focused on SE1 [Standard Edition One] and SE. Because of the packaging and the pricing for that market, that’s appropriate,” Phillips said. “There’s nothing prohibiting them from selling the high-end product, it’s just not their natural space.”

Phillips added that about 90% of sales for the Standard Edition and Standard Edition One product lines go through the channel. Those lines of software are prepackaged and stripped-down versions of Oracle’s customers geared for the lower end of the SMB market. Oracle launched a new partner program for those SMB products last month which allows resellers to sell them without formally enrolling in the company’s partner program.