Following its recent aggressive drive into the cloud computing market, Oracle has outlined a number of new incentive, training and enablement resources for its partner ecosystem.
The company says it will continue to work with its partner community to help them thrive in the cloud.
The expansion is a major new step for Oracle, which is shifting its traditional database and customer relationship management (CRM) businesses to the cloud. Oracle, along with German rival SAP, has been losing market share in CRM software in recent years to Salesforce.com, which only offers cloud-based services.
Oracle founder and executive chairman Larry Ellison recently said his database company is expanding its cloud computing offerings, bringing Oracle into more direct competition with the likes of Amazon.com.
According to Oracle, cloud is one of the fastest-growing areas across its more than 26 000 partners. In the last quarter, the company says its cloud resale programme grew 180%, which was larger than the last three quarters combined. Year-over-year, growth was more than 650%.
According to Joel Borellis, group VP for partner enablement at Oracle, the partners are under extreme pressure to move and scale to the cloud, all while leveraging existing technology investments, managing costs, and maintaining stringent SLA requirements.
To amplify Oracle's reach in the broad marketplace, Oracle Partner Network added Oracle Cloud services to Oracle's value-added distributor distribution offerings.
The two-tier distribution model for the Oracle Cloud enables partners to leverage local value-added distributors (VADs) in their respective markets to take advantage of Oracle Cloud reselling and implementation services.
The Oracle cloud resale programme will now enable both VADs and value-added resellers take advantage of new Oracle partner networking incentive rebates, regardless of the Oracle Cloud technologies they are leveraging, software-as-a-service, platform-as-a-service and infrastructure-as-a-service, the company says.
This programme provides partners with the ability to sell multi-year deals, as well as take advantage of renewals and up-sell opportunities to gain ongoing annuity, says Borellis.
According to Itayi Mandonga, an Oracle platform-as-a-service cloud specialist in SA, the partners have always been part of Oracle's go-to-market strategy and will continue to be the drive behind the success of Oracle Cloud.
Cloud is not the next big thing in IT, it's already happening and the channel is important to increase Oracle's reach, says Mandonga.
Share