This investment aims to fast-track the development of a strong regional ecosystem made up of robust local communities of Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) and System Integrators (SIs) within the South East Asian infocomms industry. PITSTOP centres will help to strengthen their technology capability, showcase their solutions and gain access to overseas markets.

There will be five PITSTOP centres set up in Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Philippines and Thailand over the next few weeks. HP and Oracle expect this network and its programmes to generate revenue of up to US$100 million for their partners over a period of five years.

This is the first such initiative in the region. At the core of this initiative, partners of HP and Oracle will be able to use the PITSTOP centres to significantly reduce both costs and time-to-market by facilitating collaboration locally and across geographic borders. PITSTOP centres will also function as a market catalyst to seek out business opportunities for local infocomm enterprises. Local developers can leverage all PITSTOP centres to expand their offshore resources, support their overseas clients, develop cross-border strategic alliances, and penetrate new markets.

"Nearly one-third of the developer community in South East Asia are either partners with HP or Oracle and they constantly look to us for more support. PITSTOP centres around the region enable us to help our partners with our technological and marketing expertise to become more effective and market-focused," said Keith Budge, Regional Managing Director, South Asia Region, Oracle Corp. "In addition, the PITSTOP centres are an important platform for the technology community to create innovative technologies and solutions."

As a 'live' lab for localised product development, all PITSTOP centres will run the full range of Oracle infrastructure software and Oracle E-Business Suite on HP's technology platform. Each PITSTOP centre will provide application developers with a well-supported competency centre that allows partner ISVs to improve their skills, develop applications and demonstrate their solutions.

"Through PITSTOP, we aim to nurture greater entrepreneurship in the local and regional IT community. We are making our enabling technologies and technical resources easily available; so that these developers can focus on developing solutions quickly and get to the market fast. We want people to come together to discover, create and experiment. This is the cornerstone of the HP's "Invent" spirit. It is what it takes to be a winner and leader in this industry," said Tan Choon Seng, Vice President and Managing Director, South East Asia/ Singapore, HP.

Both HP and Oracle will also provide consultants who will help partners gain hands-on experience with the latest and complete range of HP and Oracle technologies at the PITSTOP centres. Through regular training and workshops, HP and Oracle will also be helping to develop the expertise of consultants in the enterprise computing community within each country.