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LONDON -- Enterprise software giant Oracle may be known for big plans and bold moves, but the Redwood Shores, California, company has realized it also has to think small.

In kicking off the second day of its OpenWorld conference here Oracle highlighted products and partners for smaller companies.

The company unveiled an entry-level application server, the Oracle Application Server Standard Edition One, aimed at enterprises with limited IT resources. It also introduced a new partner program to target companies with Oracle's starter database product, the Oracle Database 10g Standard Edition One.

"Small and medium-sized businesses are very, very important to Oracle," says Andrew Sutherland, company vice president of technology in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.

"These companies have the opportunity for enormous growth and because they are starting out with advanced products they have the chance to leapfrog larger companies in terms of technology," Sutherland said.

Moving On Up

For Oracle, the idea is to scale up from a single processor all the way to grid computing technology, which is getting a big-banner push from the company. While the company was pitching small businesses software at the show, its grid computing plans were at a fever pitch.

Oracle President Charles Phillips touted the potential of the grid upon opening the conference on Monday, and that theme was carried through by Chuck Rozwat, executive vice president of development server technologies, during his Tuesday morning keynote.

"The news is we have a grid infrastructure now that lets you build applications like adding hardware components," Rozwat said.

For smaller businesses, it's one application at a time, however, and Oracle is hoping to snag these customers even when they are on the first rung.

New Products

The company is wooing small and medium-size businesses (SMBs) with Application Server Standard Edition One's prebuilt portal application, which offers basic content management and publishing capabilities. The new entry-level middleware offering is priced at half that of its full-featured Enterprise Application Server, at $4995 per processor, for up to two processors, or $149 per named user with a minimum of five users.

The company says that the new software is getting strong support from its distribution partners, resellers and distributors as they try to generate further growth in the SMB market. It has no clustering capabilities but can be scaled up, Sutherland says.

"The beauty here is that you can write an application on one processor and move onto the Standard Edition, and on up to a cluster. This is highly scalable software," Sutherland says.

To help move companies up the scale, Oracle is also relying on its Independent Software Vendor (ISV) partners to offer applications that maximize grid technologies, Sutherland says.

Hoping to speak to these ISV partners, Oracle held a separate Partner Network ISV Forum at OpenWorld this week for the first time in Europe.

At least one attendee agrees that partner support was crucial if Oracle hoped to get wide distribution of its database software.

"In some ways, the point of these conferences is for users like me to talk to the partners and developers to express our interest in something like utility computing and to push for the applications we need to make upgrading worthwhile," says Roger Ashmore, database administrator and technical applications specialist for Petri-Canada.

OpenWorld London runs through Wednesday.

Laura Rohde of the IDG News Service contributed to this report.