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Oracle is placing a sharp focus on gaining market share in the small and medium enterprise (SME) space in Brazil, with significant investments planned towards that goal.
The firm currently has a rather slim share of the SME market in Brazil – only 9 percent – according to a study by business school Fundação Getúlio Vargas (FGV). Overall, the local ERP space is dominated Brazilian software house Totvs, with a 35 percent market share, followed by SAP, with 31 percent. Oracle ranks third, with 15 percent of the local ERP business.
However, this might be about to change. The company has been delivering 40 local implementations of its enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems monthly, with SMEs representing a big chunk of that work.
Today, SMEs represent 20 percent of the firm’s business in Brazil, an “exponential” growth rate when compared with results of a couple of years ago, according to executive Vice President for Latin America at Oracle, Luiz Meisler. These customers will tend to go for the company’s cloud offering, which over the last year has been boosted by the Netsuite portfolio.
“We want to demystify the [SME user] perception that we are big and expensive – it might have been the case before, but all of that has changed now,” Meisler told journalists at Oracle Open World in São Paulo today (20). Similarly, SAP is also looking to win more SME business and change price perceptions of local smaller organizations.
According to Meisler, Oracle is ploughing resources into enhancing its own capability to serve small and medium customers. For Latin America, the company has got 1,000 people focused solely on products for this particular audience, split across Colombia and Brazil.
“We have an unlimited headcount target for [the SME-focused group]. If we find that we have to hire an additional 200 people for that unit, we will do that,” Meisler added.
According to Oracle Brazil president Rodrigo Galvão, who has been promoted to lead the country’s operations a year ago, the company expects it will be soon improving its ranking in terms of market share within SMEs, given its investments in becoming more popular among those organizations.