For Oracle, the partners business has never been stronger or more differentiated. The company believes the renewed strategy to work more closely with its partners will help accelerate digitisation for its 15,000 customers in the country
Oracle Cloud has lately risen to prominence, challenging the trident of AWS-Azure-GCP. The contribution of the channel in the growing popularity of Oracle cloud has reckoned a significant factor and added to the customer delight. While, the steps taken by the global leadership team in revamping the channel programs helped its partners to grow the trust and comfort to seamlessly integrate Oracle’s famed enterprise applications suite (ERP, Autonomous Database Management, Oracle Packaged Applications) to address end-to-end IT operations.
2022 witnesses a momentum towards Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) and Software as a Service (SaaS) in India. Cognizant, National Stock Exchange, Wipro, Punjab Urban Development Authority, Air Asia, Federal Bank, Bharti Airtel, Kotak Mahindra Bank and many more companies trust Oracle Cloud to power their businesses. Oracle expects its cloud business revenue to grow organically over 30 percent in fiscal 2023. The company is also expecting double-digit organic growth in its cloud service and license support revenue.
Oracle recognises partner
Lately, cloud heavyweight Oracle recognizes partners who demonstrate the specific expertise required to succeed seamless transformation for enterprises at the recently held partner kickoff 2022 event in Goa. The Oracle’s channel leadership team Shailender Kumar,Senior Vice President, Regional Managing Director – Oracle India, NetSuite along with APAC Oracle’s channel leaders Chung Heng Han, vice president of systems and alliances & channels for the JAPAC region, Oracle and Lalit Malik, Group Vice President, Alliances and Channels, Asia Pacific promise even more investment towards training, certifications and new opportunities for partners for keeping up the cloud momentum in India through its partners ecosystems.
Speaking at the conference in Goa, Kumar says, “With organisations embracing the digital models for disruptions and innovations the role of cloud partners is all the more important. Last year, all lines of business have grown aggressively be it Oracle OCI, Hybrid cloud services, and Netsuite. Today, 70% of cloud business comes through its channel business and many large customers accounts be it healthcare, BFSI, telcos and government are driven by the channel partners.”
Kumar sees Oracle customers’ reliance on and expectations for enterprise cloud capabilities intensifying. Many are building the future of their businesses on hybrid multicloud IT operations, which blend private and public cloud services. Increasingly that requires interoperability, including automation, across different technologies and services. “This paradigm shift in customer expectations and cloud acceleration is leading prudent partners into new partnerships,” he opines
The modern Oracle Partner Network (OPN) framework is better aligned with the strengths of the partners across the Oracle suite of products. It enables the partner to collaborate with Oracle as per their niche areas of expertise. This can be further aligned with the mode of ‘go-to-market’ that the partner prefers – be it on-premises, cloud-based, or a hybrid model.
Under OPN partners can choose to Build, Sell, or Service in their areas of strength, it creates a win-win situation and enhances the collaboration opportunities between Oracle and the partners. The track wise ‘Enablers’ – which is the tools and resources that the modern OPN provides to partners helps them to create competencies and expertise across the Oracle suite of products and its cloud offerings.
Talking about the channel contribution Malik says, “It’s notable that we’ve managed to achieve growth and momentum in the cloud business through our partners, even through the challenges of the pandemic. Practically, all of our enterprise business leverages partners. We have solutions that are perfect for our partners. We can bring new levels of efficiency, capabilities to our partners’ operation with the simplicity of the solution that we’re offering in the market, we can enable partners to win more on prem and cloud business.”
Striking right partnerships for One Oracle
The revamped partner strategy is based on four principles of customer first, joint go-to-market (GTM), skills development and a trusted partnership. The core objective of this renewed partnership strategy is to position Oracle as ‘One Oracle’ among its partners.
Striking right partnerships is more important now than ever, according to Chung Heng Han, who helps develop partner programs and foster strategic relationships with service providers, partners, value-added resellers (VARs), distributors, and global system integrators. “You can’t do it alone. Scaling a business and sustaining profitability requires working creating partnerships that give customers a simpler way to drive their digital transformation. That involves consulting, design, new products, integration, customization and support.”
With a traditional and new league of partners building, selling and servicing Oracle cloud , the year-on-year growth in certification was 57 percent in our last fiscal year. Many partners like Wipro and PwC are using Oracle for their own business needs.
“This year we will be laying strong emphasis on the industry GTM focusing on public sector, manufacturing, edtech, fintech and will also be supporting multi-cloud customer environments and ESG initiatives. Ultimately, the focus of every partner relationship should be on helping customers reshape their business models to carve out a competitive advantage in their industries. In return, there’s unlimited opportunity to earn greater margins, which at the end of the day, is one of the most important things to our partnership,” he says.
Malik reinforces, “The partners business has never been stronger or more differentiated. We have so much room to grow to address the market that we’re pursuing right now. Now’s the time really to partner very effectively with Oracle and we’re ready to support partners to help them make the pivot to our solutions and to our approach.”
How partners powering cloud businesses
Oracle Cloud is now a matured platform with numerous major customer successes. Coupled with Oracle’s recent push towards the cloud business rather than on-premises infrastructure has opened fresh opportunities for new age cloud based partners like Infolob Solutions and at the same time pushing its traditional and large database and ERP partners like Infosys and Clover Infotech to scratch the new grounds with cloud offerings and accelerate digital transformation.
Infosys Finacle: bringing better technology to banks
Talking about the partnership, Venkatramana Gosavi – Senior Vice President & Global Head of Sales, Infosys Finacle shares, “Infosys Finacle and Oracle have been partners for over two decades. Finacle’s partnership with Oracle started with one region and has today expanded to a global partnership. We partner on multiple streams like hardware, technology components, applications and Cloud. We have also developed multiple joint solutions and offerings. For example, we worked with a major bank in India for transforming customer experience using Oracle applications. We also worked with a large bank in South Asia in consolidating their database workloads onto Oracle platforms. I am confident our partnership will continue to expand in the coming years, with a joint focus on enabling banks to accelerate and scale digital.”
Finacle’s GTM strategy with Oracle is centered around three key areas firstly, developing joint solutions for the banking industry, optimizing Finacle performance on Oracle technology and deploying Finacle on Cloud.
Clover Infotech- leveraging capabilities and competency
Mumbai based Clover Infotech, an Oracle partner for over two decades has been among the most preferred Oracle Database Management Services providers for over twenty-five years now. Since Clover Infotech is very strong in the BFSI space, the company sees immense opportunities in areas such as Core banking (with Oracle Flexcube), Oracle ERP Cloud (strategic decision making and insights), OFSAA (Risk Analytics and management), MySQL Heatwave Database Services (the databases that bring OLTP and OLAP onto the same cloud platform), Oracle Content and Experience (Digital experience management), Oracle AVDF (Cybersecurity – Database Activity Monitoring).
“We are industry agnostic and have done some of our best work in Oracle technologies across customers from banking to insurance, to financial services as well as manufacturing, to metals, to travel companies. Since the cloud is more about usage than ownership, the customers now want to ensure that the Oracle Cloud investments can enable them to also optimize usage of resources. The cloud has made clover work together more efficiently and the results are there for all to see. Over the years, we want to be the most preferred Oracle partner across all key geographies, and we are extremely focused on attaining this goal,” adds Kunal Nagarkatti, CEO, Clover Infotech.
However, he also pointed out the adoption of Oracle Cloud products vis-à-vis the far cheaper market options were a challenge. Customers wanted to understand the benefits and value extensively. Post the initial adoption inertia, customers began to see value and the success stories have enabled us to make more informed pitches to new customers.
Infolob Solution: Preparing for Multi-cloud environments
Another cloud-first company started the partnership with Oracle in Feb 2021. Infolob is a rare, only-Oracle enabler with strong competencies over the whole technology stack including IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS. It holds more than 25 Oracle expertise across 12 specializations to serve clients in the regions of North America, EMEA, and APAC.
When asked about the renewed focus of Oracle on partners, Satyendra Pasalapudi, Managing Director, Infolob Solutions says, “Oracle is focused on growing along with its partners while hybrid cloud is the current customer choice but multi cloud is the future. With Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and Microsoft Azure making strategic alliances, it is clear that Oracle does not wish to keep customers hostage to their platform and is progressive to supporting multi-cloud environments. Both these factors of customized solutions and multi-cloud future truly match with Infolob leadership’s perception of future. Therefore, we are accumulating top-tier talent to deliver the same.”
Consequently, Inflolob continues to lead the certifications race. It identifies Oracle MySQL Database Service (MDS), with Heatwave, and Data Lakehouse as the offerings that will have the greatest uptake in next five years.
The cloud momentum continues to be strong. Oracle is offering the partners a true hybrid cloud experience for their customers with an open approach. And they can add their own managed services experience on top of that. Oracle has been a pioneer in enterprise digital transformation for decades and its cloud platform — OCI will lead its partners to a true data economy.
