Amid Oracle's accelerating shift to cloud services, the company's top partners are not getting left behind, the IT giant asserts.
Indeed, Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN) has roughly 25,000 members. Among the members, more than 2,600 unique partners have joined the Oracle PartnerNetwork Cloud Program. Those partners, in turn, have increased their cloud resell revenue 105 percent year over year, Oracle claims.
Instead of resting on those outcomes, Oracle has launched the Oracle Cloud Excellence Implementer (CEI) program at this week's Oracle OpenWorld 2017 conference in San Francisco, Kimberly Lasseter, senior director, worldwide alliances & channels at Oracle, tells ChannelE2E.
This program will recognize and reward partners that continually demonstrate expertise, a successful track record, and superior customer satisfaction in delivering high-quality Oracle Software as a Service (SaaS) Cloud implementations to customers.
Take a closer look at that emphasis on SaaS. Oracle CEO Mark Hurd has repeatedly stated that he expects two software suite providers to dominate the SaaS market. Oracle, no doubt, tops that list in Hurd's mind. He doesn't publicly predict the major SaaS rival -- though it's safe to say Microsoft, SAP and Salesforce are vying for that spot.
The SaaS focus is an important point. Although Oracle's IaaS business is growing, it's still tiny compared to Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.
Oracle CEI Status: What Are the Perks?
The company states that partners may qualify for CEI status with individual Oracle cloud service module(s) within defined geographies, and must meet a rigorous set of entry and ongoing engagement criteria in order to remain in the program. Firms that achieve CEI status will be able to further differentiate themselves in the market and receive the highest level of benefits and deeper engagement with Oracle. The benefits of this program include priority listing within the OPN Solutions Catalog and Oracle Cloud Marketplace, Oracle Cloud Learning subscription discounts, Oracle Cloud Implementation Workshops and more.
Another way Oracle is helping partners grow their cloud business is through providing independent software vendors a platform to grow. With Oracle's collection of available PaaS and IaaS services, they are delivering cloud services and capabilities for developers, as well as programs, resources, and commercial models that meet both immediate business needs and longer-term growth objectives.
Accenture's Oracle Moves
True believers in Oracle's cloud efforts include Accenture, which announced a Cloud Suite for Oracle at the conference. The suite is designed to integrate with organizations’ architectures at multiple levels and incorporates more than 200 journey to cloud accelerators, assets and tools across Oracle’s existing Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), and Data-as-a-Service offerings (DaaS). The Cloud Suite encompasses four key areas that support rapid adoption of Oracle’s cloud technology:
- Architect – Provides reference architectures, models, decision trees, point of views, blueprints, and more to help build robust, scalable, secure, and mature architectures.
- Accelerate – Speeds up planning and execution with starter kits, common services, pre-built integrations, and solution guidelines, along with industry-specific and cross-industry process flows, configurations, testing and training assets.
- Automate – Removes manual work from implementations and migrations to the cloud with automated tools for DevOps, migration (Accenture Cloud Connect), testing and environment provisioning.
- Delivery – Combines Accenture’s experience in industrialized delivery methods with agile and liquid delivery for cloud solutions.
With these programs and initiatives, including the MSP program announced last year, Oracle is making its case to try and win over the crowded cloud services market. The company claims that they are one of the only cloud providers to deliver complete product portfolios across SaaS, IaaS, PaaS and DaaS. In terms of revenues, some areas (likely SaaS and DaaS) are certainly stronger than others.
Additional insights from Joe Panettieri.
