Sanjoy Mukherjee – Head Alliances & Channels, Oracle talks about enhancements in PartnerNetwork 2020 program and how with the opening of the Gen 2 Cloud region, Oracle is able to offer its customers a modern and second-generation cloud
What have been the key highlights of 2019? How do you see the IT channel industry growing in 2020?
2019 saw an increase in cloud adoption in India with digitisation, with the growing need for business to operate efficiently and with the need to increase speed to market. These and more have been important vectors in the cloud movement. More and more Indian organisations want to do more with less, so they get to focus on their core business. Customers understand that a cloud foundation can prepare them for growth. And with our recently opened Gen 2 Cloud region, we are able to offer customers a modern, second-generation cloud that has been built and optimised specifically to help enterprises run their most demanding workloads securely.
Channel partners have an important role to enable this shift. We closely collaborate with our partner organisations to help customers take advantage of Oracle’s Gen 2 Cloud capabilities, including the Oracle Autonomous Database: it redefines database management by using machine learning and automation to eliminate human labour, human error, and manual tuning of the database. It reduces cost and complexity and ensures higher reliability, security, and more operational efficiency – all functionalities that ultimately benefit customers.
Can you share the top focus areas that the channel community should be betting on and why?
Customers are in need of partners with deep domain expertise. They are turning to emerging technologies like AI/ML, IoT, blockchain, chatbots to unlock new growth avenues, improve productivity, efficiencies and accelerate innovation. Here is where our partners play a key role. Their expertise such as technology understanding, implementation and consulting skills come into play. We continuously support and invest in our partners to help them acquire new cloud capabilities and specialisations so they are able to keep pace with customers’ changing business environment and business demands. Another important generational innovation that channel partners should bet on is autonomous cloud services – it is the future of database management.
What are the top channel directions your company has set for your partners and where should partners invest to be aligned with these directions?
For Oracle, channel partners play an important role in enabling our customers’ growth agenda. We’ll continue to make investments in strengthening our partner network, expanding our partner ecosystem and skilling all partner specialists. As the demand for Oracle Cloud continues and with our own investments to serve the market, we announced that Oracle will open our second Gen 2 Cloud region in India soon. We’re working closely with ISV’s and cloud platform partners to make sure we have the necessary solutions and skill sets that will aide our customers to get the maximum value from Oracle Cloud. We recently revamped the Oracle PartnerNetwork 2020 program and is now more customer-centric, success-driven and simplified. It’s a cloud-first modern partner program that helps accelerate partner organisations’ transition to the cloud, driving superior customer experience and strong business outcomes. We’ll continue our focus on skilling, reskilling partners for a cloud-first world.
