Scottish Water plans to use the new offering to connect the company's call centres directly with its field engineers across Scotland to allow on-the-spot scheduling of service calls through Oracle TeleServices and Oracle Field Service applications. Other enterprises including Equity Technology (Sweden), ID Systeme (Germany), Franhofer and Damstadt Echo (Germany) have also signed up for the Oracle 10g wireless proposition with Vodafone.

At OracleWorld event last month, the company introduced Oracle Database 10g, Oracle Application Server 10g and Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g. Together, they comprise Oracle Grid Computing, the company's integrated grid infrastructure software. The new offerings are designed with enhanced features to support grid computing by pooling servers and storage into a unified system that provides up-to-date business information.

The initiative shall cover joint development work, marketing efforts and an intention to launch further products. The two companies will enable customers to offer field workers, such as sales staff or service engineers, mobile access to key business systems.

"Mobile workforces equipped with real-time access to relevant company information can do their jobs more efficiently and effectively, offering better customer service," said Peter Bamford, Group Marketing Officer at Vodafone Group "This improves business profitability and customer loyalty, which are important goals in today's competitive marketplace. Vodafone will be promoting this as part of its enterprise business proposition." Currently, pilot customers in health care, government, utilities and media industries are performing final trials before general availability, currently planned for November 2003.

"Increasing productivity through mobilising software applications is one of the key growth opportunities for Vodafone,"," he continued. "We are pleased to be working with Oracle as one of our partners in addressing this opportunity. Oracle has a strong mobile technology foundation and extensive portfolio of applications that enable mobile access to back end systems. With this joint proposition we have been able to reduce complexity, with an end-to-end solution based on open standards."

"Oracle sees great value in the growing alliance with Vodafone," said Jacob Christfort, vice president and chief technology officer for Oracle's Mobile Products & Services Division. "Oracle has already developed specific SMS, LBS, and MMS drivers to Vodafone's API gateways within Oracle9i Application Server Wireless. This means that all applications that run on the Oracle Application Server, including Oracle E-Business Suite, Oracle Collaboration Suite and bespoke applications, will come pre-enabled for Vodafone's Network Services. This reduces the complexity of deploying mobile enterprise applications and can dramatically reduce the cost and time for enterprises to implement mobile access to back-end systems."