Computer giants HP and Oracle - whose products were once aimed primarily at large organisations - will partner to target small to medium-sized businesses with software, hardware and services.
The announcement, which came in keynote addresses by Oracle president Mr Charles Phillips and HP chief executive and chairman Ms Carly Fiorina at Oracle's OpenWorld conference, comes as part of a continuing trend among technology companies to eye the huge, and largely untapped, SME sector.
Companies such as SAP, Oracle and HP have been stripping down their large software suites and chopping them into smaller modules to attract SMEs, which have benefited from access to cheaper and more powerful hardware, and are interested in the capabilities of these more complex software products and related services.
"We are a partner by strategy, by personality and by choice," Ms Fiorina said of HP's relationship with Oracle and other strategic partners.
In what is described as the "first phase" of the initiative, the partnership will push Oracle's E-Business Suite Special Edition, a package of Oracle's E-Business Suite 11i business applications that is aimed at SMEs with up to 50 users, and HP's ProLiant servers, which HP resellers often supply to smaller companies.
Ms Fiorina said that the two firms already share 88,000 customers, and that 70 per cent of HP customers running HP's version of the Unix operating system also run Oracle database software.
Ms Fiorina said that businesses are setting the technology agenda, which is not so much about technology but about information. People don't want to focus on how information is delivered but on getting the information to where they need it, when they need it, and in the right context, she said.
She believes the arrival of specialised sensors, wireless technologies and radio frequency identification (RFID) tags - small, rice-grain-sized chips that can be attached to almost anything and carry a range of information about an item - is set "to transform business practices and enable faster, smarter business decisions".
This trend "will add trillions of new devices to the network in the next few years", all broadcasting information that needs to be managed, shared and stored. "It's about connecting up what was not connected before," she said.
Mr Phillips said its interest in SMEs stems from fast growth in the SME sector coupled with Oracle's ability to slim down software applications to SME size - such as its E-Business Suite 11i and its SME-friendly 10g version of its database software, released earlier this year.
