February saw Oracle Corp. (NASDAQ: ORCL) taking the Valentine’s Day spirit to heart by showing partners a little love, with several steps to become more channel-friendly, including a new partner event, a new specialization and more marketing initiatives.
Earlier this month, the company held its first executive partner summit in California for about 60 of its largest partners. “Really we formalized the process of pulling together, in North America, our top specialized partners,” said Lydia Smyers, Oracle’s group vice-president of worldwide alliances and channel communications.
Oracle’s top executives, including company president Mark Hurd, attended the event and provided briefings on sales strategies and product road maps for the coming year.
Those executive appearances were important for Jack Gulas, CTO at Ottawa-based Maplesoft Group, who saw Hurd speak three separate times for about 30 minutes. “The quality of people that they brought in to talk with a lot of transparency was both very refreshing but also very inspiring,” he said. “I think that shows clearly their commitment level.”
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It will be an annual event, which Gulas said is a positive as it provided a valuable networking opportunity with similar partners and insight into Oracle’s direction.
One major topic of interest during the event was the recently-launched Oracle Database Appliance (ODA), the company’s first official channel-only product.
“We’re going to continue to build on the success of (ODA), absolutely,” Smyers told CDN. We’ve seen huge opportunities with it.The Canadian marketplace as a whole has much more of a broad market or midmarket than the U.S.,” providing a major opportunity to sell the ODA.
“I think they’re experimenting with ODA,” he said, but the channel-led model seems to be working for the company when tackling the mid-market.
During the event, Oracle also launched a new ad campaign and a new video. “We’re now able to allow partners to actually customize these ads and add their logos,” Symers said. “We’re really being strategic about placement,” with the ODA ad, including advertising on city metros, but also continuing its marketing in airports, she added.
The event came just days after the company announced a new MySQL specialization for partners at the end of January. “Our channel partners are looking for an alternative to Microsoft SQL server,” she said. Creating a specialization allows partners to approach customers with more confidence and authority on the product.
“The specializations are absolutely the route to get recognized,” Gulas said. “The specializations provide the context to how this particular product fits within the larger context of Oracle.”
Still, investment is critical to gaining from a partnership with Oracle, he said. For example, the company has more than 80 specializations, which require proven business and technical competency to obtain.
“For those companies that are willing to invest in Oracle, it’s very, very rewarding back. There’s been a lot of positive changes since Mark Hurd joined the company,” he said. “They’re becoming more and more rewarding, and in my opinion, much more channel friendly and channel-centric to those companies that are investing in them.”
Earlier this week, distributor Avnet Technology Solutions also announced it would partner with Oracle to sell two of its Health Sciences solutions, which Oracle previously sold direct.
Late last year, London-Ont.-based Info-Tech Research Group analyst James Alexander told CDN that Oracle would be a company to watch in 2012, as executive changes foreshadowed a more partner-centric approach.
“I would say that that legacy perception of Oracle is accurate,” Smyers said, but more so when Oracle was strictly a database company. “We understand that we need our channel partners to get us reach to all of the customers that need and can benefit from our solutions.”
Follow Harmeet Singh on Twitter: @HarmeetCDN
