Driving growth

Oracle's channel boss tells us why he only wants partners prepared to put in the miles on a Rolls-Royce technology

The maxim of "get big, get niche, or get out" is a familiar one in the channel. Oracle chief Larry Ellison does not seem the kind of person to do things by halves, so perhaps it is no surprise that he seemingly chose to build his firm by getting both big and niche.

With revenue of almost $40bn (£24bn), the database titan is one of the IT world's biggest names. But enterprise software is not a plug-and-play mass-market proposition; it is an arcane and specialised space, requiring a depth of technical and sales expertise. Oracle's acquisition of one of the globe's biggest server makers - Sun Microsystems - only adds to the nuanced complexity of its channel.

Will O'Brien, appointed as the vendor's UK director of alliance and channels last summer, inherited a roster of about 1,100 partners. Many of these "have built their business on Oracle", he claims.

"This job is about providing stability to the business partners, as opposed to saying ‘I'm going to come in and change everything'. It is about predictability, stability, and helping them migrate from business models that have been around for years," he adds. "I want to use my time and resources to reward the people who have been with us for a long time. A large company can easily come into a channel and say ‘this is what we are going to do'. What we are trying to do is ask how we can both benefit from the partnership."

O'Brien explains that he is not in the business of adding hundreds, or even scores of new partners to the mix. But the UK channel boss wants to encourage more alliances between the traditional Sun base of large systems resellers and smaller specialists with niche Oracle skills. He points to the example of SCC teaming up with Oracle house e-DBA, and suggests the chance to branch out into software and services is a potential lifeline to many server shops operating in an increasingly tough market.

"We are definitely seeing traditional Sun partners wanting to diversify. One of the things that is a feature of the value-added reseller industry is that they have built hundreds of millions of dollars of business on the back of [selling] products," he says. "These are businesses operating on margins of between one and four per cent. If there is a collapse of server revenue, and you are distributing hundreds of millions of dollars of brand X or brand Y in a market that is decreasing, the potential impact on your P&L is catastrophic."

Invest for success
The Oracle channel chief (pictured right) is open to bringing "a handful" of further big resellers into the enterprise software fold. But he stresses the need for new partners to invest in buying, developing or partnering their way to the required specialist skills, and that he is not looking for those "that are just going to treat this as category 10" on an already bulging linecard.

"Our products are enterprise-grade. If you are [selling] Microsoft or Symantec, a lot of their products are off-the-shelf-type products. Oracle is not a commodity, it is a Rolls-Royce technology - you cannot expect 200 or 300 graduates to suddenly become good at positioning Oracle," he says.

"If I were meeting one of the big volume players, my advice would be: do not try to treat this as a technology that you can put in your call centre. Either buy [or partner with] a company, or set up a separate division. But you can make a very, very successful business by becoming specialists."

The message to the UK's top VARs seems clear: you may have got big, but now may be the time to get niche too.