How has Oracle dramatically increased stickiness? And what impact will this have on Oracle's channel business long-term?

Tony Mulligan, who heads up Oracle's EMEA partner sales, gave a presentation on the site at the April meeting of the Routes to Market Association. He says the site's success is down to several factors. Firstly, partners and individuals within partners can profile themselves, and thus see the data which is most relevant to them. Secondly, navigation within the site is by modules which correspond to job functions. Thirdly, Oracle has included a lot of new information on industries and customer benefits.

Perhaps the most important thing about the site is that the cut you get depends on which of around 35 job functions you input, and on your partner status. "Go in as a salesman and you will see something totally different from a technician," says Mulligan.

Navigation is partner-, rather than Oracle-centric. Mulligan says: "We have five tabs - sales development, market, deliver and manage. Each relates to the main functions within a partner organisation." Oracle has larded the site with business, as well as product, data. Mulligan says: "You will find articles on the typical return on investment, as well as on cost and support issues." The site also supplies information on vertical markets, allowing partners to swiftly swot up before presentations.

But the site goes much further than this. It is designed as the platform from which Oracle partners can run large swathes of their business. You can demonstrate software from the Oracle site. And this can be tailored to individual applications. In marketing, Oracle is offering not just banners and artwork, but also launching-pads with follow-on qualifying questions - the sales and leads funnels found on so many internet sites. This can be outsourced in its entirety to Oracle.

Several new features will be added in version two of the website. This will allow partners to share their sales pipeline data with Oracle. It will also allow partners to claim ownership of new leads, and of the prospects they are working on. How does Oracle ensure that this huge site is updated smoothly daily? Power is, in fact, devolved to line managers - Mulligan, for instance, owns the sales tab in Europe. National sales managers under him ensure that the relevant information is updated in the national language.

Mulligan says that the single supersite is much easier to maintain and run than the 23 it replaces. Also, partners are effectively maintaining their own database information. "Previously the data we had was always out-of-date. Now partners do it themselves. It is in their interest to ensure that the data is up-to-date."

Finally, Mulligan reckons that the quality and quantity of data that partners are now feeding back to Oracle is such that it can retrain its 200 partner sales people in Europe: "some of them have become administrators, simply collecting data from our partners. Much of that can now be done by the website. We want them to become a virtual sales force available to the partners." He claims the entire project took under a year from start to finish, with the actual programming taking little more than three months. These are remarkably short time frames for such a massive project. Perhaps that is because the force behind the new system was Larry Ellison himself.