Ritesh Syal, Senior Director and Head-Alliances & Channels, Oracle India, shares the company’s channel strategies for 2019
Key highlights 2018 and opportunities for 2019
2018 saw a number of technologies moving from hype to actual implementation. We saw strong adoption of cloud technologies by Indian businesses and we expect this to pick up further pace in 2019. Given the IT spending in India is expected to grow to US$ 89.2 billion in 2019, we see a lot of opportunity for channel players to drive large scale business transformation of customers. 2019 will also see a lot many channel partners make the mind-set shift towards cloud and reinventing their business models. With cloud as the foundation, we expect more uptake for emerging tech paradigms such as AI/ML, blockchain and chatbots in the enterprise, thereby unleashing a new level of market opportunity for the channel ecosystem.
Top tech trends for channel community
With more and more Indian companies looking to transform into digital-first businesses, the move to cloud is becoming increasingly appealing. I have seen Indian businesses leapfrog some of their APAC peers when it comes to cloud adoption. Our partners understand this and are aligning themselves for a cloud-first world, where businesses are increasingly turning to emerging technologies like AI/ML, blockchain and chatbots to unlock new growth avenues, improve productivity, efficiencies and accelerate innovation. Another important generational innovation that the channel partners should bet on is autonomous cloud services, as automation is fast becoming table stakes.
Channel directions for partners
Clearly cloud will continue to be our focus for 2019 and beyond. There is an opportunity for every partner to choose an area in the cloud, be it IaaS/PaaS or SaaS and expand their specialisations. I believe in the ‘partners for profit’ philosophy of doing businesses and are highly focussed on enhancing the skill sets of our channel partners,
enabling them to become more standardised, which can result in them winning more business together with Oracle.
For 2019, two of our key growth objectives are: strengthening our SaaS leadership, with cloud ERP as the beachhead; and helping Indian businesses upgrade to the technology of tomorrow, today – with generational innovations like Oracle Gen 2 cloud and our autonomous database, the world’s first and only ‘self-driving, self-securing and self-repairing’ database. Our partners are aligned to these focus areas and are committed to make this an even more mutually rewarding year.
