New incentives for existing partners too
The Oracle partner announcements did not stop with Cloud registered level. Oracle will be adding all of its PaaS, IaaS and SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) solutions to its Oracle cloud resale program in 2016. This will allow resellers access to selling these solutions with appropriate rebates for levels of success.
Partners will be able to sell multi-year deals to customers and also cut deals for renewals and upselling. This will be well received by the partner ecosystem as they seek to maintain revenues from customers eager to move to the cloud, it may also flag that Oracle has not been successful as it had hoped in selling direct.
Partners with existing relationships with customers will be able to fight back against born in the cloud companies such as Workday and Netsuite as they, and in Netsuites case, their partners seek to wean them off Oracle. This should make them fight harder to win business from Oracle and will also stem a leakage of channel to these new ERP vendors.
The press release pointed out that growth by its partner channel has been high, though percentage based figures for cloud growth are always a little debatable with no figures to back them up. The Oracle cloud resale program has seen 122% growth in the last year and the Oracle Cloud Connection online community has had 350,000 views since its launch last year, though actual updates seem fairly infrequent according to the view on this webpage
Conclusion
Is this an admittance that the Oracle cloud story is not a strong as Ellison would have hoped or that Oracle are indeed ready to come out of its start-up phase for Oracle cloud with all guns blazing? Offering PaaS and IaaS only through the Cloud registered level seems limiting, though it does indicate that for the moment Oracle does not want to upset its existing partners.
For those resellers looking to have the Oracle brand on their website this will be attractive. While there is no indication how easy it will be to become a cloud reseller one assumes that there are some hoops to be jumped through.
It will be interesting in May to see what the take up has been and whether Oracle extend the “free” period further or add additional incentives to the program, such as support before insisting companies make a commitment to pay. Potentially this is a significant move and if Oracle can galvanise its partners to start selling cloud services, especially SaaS, then its cloud revenues could accelerate significantly. With Openworld continuing this week it will be interesting to see what further announcements there are.
CIO’s will no doubt see a renewed enthusiasm from their Oracle partners as these products become available to them to offer. It is in those relationships and how many can be converted into sales will the Oracle cloud story be told. For Oracle, it may be disappointing to share the profits from cloud with its partners, but better some profits than the slim market share that several were predicting for technology giant.
