Macromedia's Supporting Roles

"Application servers are fairly technical sales, and we put a focus on training resellers on the products," says John Magee, senior director of Oracle 9i marketing. "We think resellers are part and parcel to Oracle's overall economy. We have removed the split between the product-marketing materials sent to our internal sales personnel and to our partners," he explains. "And we always bring our partners into all of our Oracle-based trade shows and events and have them come to the market with us."

Oracle has greatly expanded the capability of its core database services. "We now support wireless applications, business intelligence, Web services, Java services and portal construction services on our Application Server," Magee says. "This is a wide range of functionality and consolidates a lot of different pieces of middleware that were previously sold in separate packages."

The goal is to allow Oracle's partners to use the Application Server product in a variety of situations, thus creating new sales opportunities.