Oracle talks up channel progress

Vendor claims partners are warming to benefits enlarged company can offer as it continues to widen OPN

Oracle has re-asserted its channel-friendly credentials and has claimed that former Sun partners are beginning to warm to the vendor.

Talking to ChannelWeb, Alan Hartwell, Oracle’s UK vice president of technology solutions and channels, claimed most partners are now cognizant of the benefits of working with an end-to-end hardware and software provider.

He also stressed that Oracle now has over 50 specialisations open to partners via the Oracle Partner Network (OPN), compared with about 35 a year ago.

New specialisations have recently been added around tape, unified storage, oil & gas, natural resources and consumer goods.

He suggested the role of the partner would increasingly be to provide wrap-around services for specialised areas of Oracle’s portfolio.

“Partners are increasingly less focused on reselling commodity products and services and are looking to reposition themselves higher up the value stack,” Hartwell said.

“We now have a stack from the bottom to the top, from disk to application.”

Hartwell also urged partners to get on board with Oracle’s new combined hardware and software offerings - Exadata and Exalogic - which were unveiled at OpenWorld in September.

“These are Oracle’s unique propositions to the market and therefore something unique partners can offer,” he said.

Hartwell admitted that Oracle had initially struggled to win over Sun partners but claimed perceptions were changing.

“Over the months, the awareness of the opportunities has become far greater than what was perceived early on as fear, uncertainty and doubt,” he said.

“Oracle has always had roughly the same balance of direct versus indirect. Between 40 and 50 per cent of our revenues goes through our channel so we are a big partner-centric company.”

Hartwell said he was also open to taking on new partners. “Oracle’s key goal is to increase our market share, so there will be more and more space for both existing partners to grow and for us to take on new partners in areas we haven’t covered before,” he said.