Simon Hill, Head of UK&I Alliances and Channels at Oracle, reports a good global partner conference for the business, with UK partners winning global awards and record numbers attending. Picking up the themes from the meeting, he reports a renewed emphasis on infrastructure-as-a-service, where he says he thinks Oracle has a unique offering. The target is public cloud, with both reseller partners and distributors in the channels, selling platform-as-a-service and infrastructure-as-a-service, and bringing in new partners and new customers.
He is also reporting growth among the numbers of partners offering volume sales – formalised standard products at fixed prices sold via the cloud, where distribution has a part to play. This is all part of the “cloud first” strategy which was so prominent at the conference. He is keen to recruit IaaS partners- who may be integrators, and extend further into more specialised partners. “We are getting aggressive in this area of IaaS, where we have the only integrated offering in datacentres.”
A new simpler form of contract is also now available to Oracle partners which allows them to no only sell cloud solutions, but to renew them and do the account control. “This is a new business model,” says Simon Hill. “Oracle now has the widest portfolio of cloud offerings.”