New Oracle UK channel boss emphasises stability

Will O'Brien claims opportunity for Oracle hardware partners greater than ever

Oracle's new UK channel boss says his reign will be characterised by stability and consistency and has batted off suggestions there is no money in reselling its hardware.

CRN caught up with Will O'Brien, who was appointed as vice president of alliance and channels for Oracle UK in August, at a post OpenWorld media event.

Oracle's annual customer shindig, which took place in San Francisco late last month, saw the vendor continue to push its applications-to-disk message and launch 10 new cloud services as well as a Cloud Marketplace for partners.

O'Brien (pictured) said the message to the 800 European partners who attended OpenWorld was one of stability rather than change, a philosophy he would echo in his new post.

"Taking on the role, I didn't want to come in and change things for the sake of it as our business partners want predictability, stability and innovation," he said.

"I want to develop the concept of more specialisation and having partners that can do more. The ideal is we find a partner that can take some of the Fusion applications we have and run those down to the hardware platforms we are providing. We want to bring alive the application-to-disk message and that is entirely consistent with what our business partners have been investing in the past number of years."

Oracle's hardware business has shrunk continually since its acquired server and storage giant Sun in 2010 and several of Sun's former top UK partners are known to have defected to rivals. In Oracle's most recent quarter, hardware revenue dropped back one per cent to $1.67bn (£1bn), despite chief executive Larry Ellison predicting the unit would have returned to growth by now following the launch of its M5 and T5 systems in March.

But O'Brien said partners recognise the SPARC refresh means Oracle now boasts a "best-in-class" server line-up. He maintained the margins on offer are higher than ever following its recent move to hoist rebates for partners selling multiple elements of its portfolio into the same customer.

"There is always work to do to win over partners but if anything, Oracle is investing substantially more than Sun did on its own in provisioning new products," he said.

"I believe that Oracle is uniquely placed to offer the highest price performance in the industry and if our reseller partners can get on board with that, they could derive significantly enhanced revenues. If anything, from the start of this fiscal year we have opened up the reseller opportunity to partners. There's an enhanced margin proposition if they are selling multiple products we consider to be strategic into the broad market."

Gavin Dimmock, vice president of hardware sales at Oracle, stressed that Oracle's Unix business is now declining less rapidly than "pretty much all of its competitors" and that its engineered systems revenue grew 60 per cent quarter on quarter in Q1.

"It's a completely new architecture which challenges the status quo in their datacentre," Dimmock said. "So the pattern we are seeing with our customer base is they will generally start small. Few get one and then say ‘we're done' – they'll go for one or two, then extend it to other lines of business applications before going enterprise."