"The problem is the perception about Oracle only being suitable for a larger client," he said. "That has prevented us from getting sales at a lot of these smaller companies. It's not so much that these new discounts are better than what we have historically done, it just finally getting that message to the market."
The software still won't come cheap: Customers can expect to spend close to six-figure sums on licensing and at least that much on deployment services. Oracle's first U.S. Special Edition customer, lighting systems seller Amerlux LLC in Fairfield, New Jersey, will spend nearly $500,000 this year to get up and running, according to director of operations Matt Glass. The total includes licensing, services work from Oracle partner Core Services Corp., maintenance and application hosting by Oracle.
Amerlux is replacing a hodgepodge of stand-alone systems by licensing the Special Edition suite for 48 users. Amerlux also looked at Microsoft Corp.'s Navision, Great Plains and Axapta software, along with software from Epicor Software Corp. and from SAP's midmarket line, Glass said. None of the other offerings were as compelling as Oracle's, particularly because of Oracle's ability to expand to the full enterprise E-Business Suite as Amerlux grows, Glass said. With SAP in particular, the idea of doing a rip-and-replace if Amerlux outgrew the Business One software wasn't attractive, he said.
"With Oracle, you can kind of crawl, then walk, and run later," Glass said. "It wasn't quite a slam-dunk, but it was pretty close."
Amerlux is already close to the 50-user cap on the Special Edition, but Glass said he's not worried because he doesn't expect to expand the license for several years, and when Amerlux does, its contract specifies that it will pay the higher per-user licensing fees only for those users above the cap -- rather than suddenly stepping up to paying the higher rate for all users.
Down the road, he also anticipates expending beyond the modules offered in the Special Edition bundle. "We didn't get some of the sexier stuff like iStore (for e-commerce)," Glass said. "We'll probably blow that out in two to three years."
In Europe and Asia, where Oracle has sold the Special Edition for several years, the company has built a network of 150 resellers and a referable base of customers, according to Oracle's Phillips.
'We've had time to learn what works, to refine it and adjust it," Phillips said. "That took some time longer than we would have liked, but it happened."
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