By Chung Heng Han
During my seven years at Oracle working with systems integrators, ISVs, managed service providers, and other technology partners across the globe, I’ve always asked their executive leaders one question: What does it take to be your partner of choice?
Their responses revolve around four main areas: customers, skills, trust, and profitability. That is, our partners look to us to help solve our joint customers’ business and technical challenges. They rely on us to help them develop the right skillsets to ensure our customers’ success. They ask that we truly partner together rather than compete with them—building trust. And our partners rely on us to provide a sound commercial model for our joint engagements.
In the age of subscription cloud services our partner go-to-market model is much more about guiding our joint customers—on both a technical and business level—through their digital transformation journeys. It is about working together to change the world.
As Doug Hughes, APAC, Africa and ANZ business lead for the Accenture Oracle Business Group, explains, “Customers need a trusted hand as they navigate this new era.”
He adds, “Our deep partnership with Oracle means we can accelerate and enhance the power and integration of Oracle for our clients, helping them win faster as they transform their businesses. Together, we are helping companies unlock the full value of technology to supercharge their success for today and tomorrow.”
One of Oracle’s more than 500 trusted partners in India is Cargo Exchange, a Hyderabad-based ISV with which we worked on a pilot service that gave select participants in the country’s import/export industry centralized access to a comprehensive electronic audit trail of trade documents. The pilot blockchain platform, running on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) and Oracle Blockchain Cloud Service, can help to improve the security and transparency of import/export transactions in India, simplify and accelerate their execution, and lower their costs.
Now, depending on where customers are in their digital transformation journeys, we work with our partners on everything from architectural planning to system implementation to business process reengineering to strategic consulting. 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, whether it’s in the context of personalized medicine, smart cities, industrial IoT, digital banking, omnichannel retail, or other industry mega-trends.
The best relationships
As ISVs, systems integrators, managed service providers, and value-added resellers consider working with large cloud vendors, which attributes should they evaluate? For starters, consider which vendors offer a comprehensive portfolio of cloud infrastructure, platform, and application services, including applications tailored to specific industries. In this multicloud world, it’s also important to work with vendors whose cloud services integrate with those of competing vendors. And consider cloud vendors whose services can run at a customers’ location, particularly important in highly regulated industries.
Many companies and government institutions are struggling to find and retain talented technical professionals, due to both the Great Resignation and the overall tech labor shortage. It’s important to partner with cloud vendors that offer customers the latest technical training and certifications, helping them close that skills gap.
Asia Pacific is a huge market, representing 40% of the world’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Because most of the region’s companies and government institutions started on their digital transformation journeys later than their counterparts in North America and Europe, they have a huge opportunity to leapfrog early adopters, much like the region did with mobile communications. Our partners share in that vast opportunity. Together we can make a difference.
Chung Heng Han is Oracle’s Singapore-based senior vice president of systems and alliances & channels for the JAPAC region.
