On the eve of its Partner Kickoff conference, Oracle announced it’s going to provide stackable incentives to channel partners who address the broad market, attached Oracle support contracts to deals and those who register deals.
Oracle will also reward solution providers with additional back end rebates on what the company calls “Oracle-on-Oracle” transactions. This is when a partner sells Oracle software on Oracle servers or Oracle servers with Oracle tiered storage equipment to the same customer in the same quarter. Solution providers will be looking at the potential to earn between eight and 10 points of additional margins. When added to front end margins these deals could net partners between 18 to 20 points of margin.
Jeff Porter, World Wide Alliances & Channels Go-to-Market Director for Oracle, told CDN that these margin enhancements are very lucrative and the company has to rely on the channel to extend the reach to millions of businesses without any direct (selling) involvement.
“These rebates are strategic and help to bring focus for a partner in areas that can substantially grow more revenue,” he said.
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Under the Oracle Partner Network channel program, the company has 25,000 worldwide partners. The company does not breakdown how many are based in Canada, but Joel Borellis, group vice president, Partner Enablement for Oracle, did say that about 5,000 of these partners have turned themselves into specialist and have built business practices on business intelligence and other areas.
Oracle has about 130 specializations for channel partners in areas such as apps, engineered systems, servers and storage and cloud.
In the cloud area, Oracle made significant changes to how they go to market with channel partners.
Porter said that starting next quarter solution providers will be able to resell Oracles’ Fusion cloud offerings in an open way and for the lifetime of the customer. Porter added that Oracle’s plan is to offer cloud subscriptions at a discount to the channel partner. The partner would pay Oracle and then be able to mark up and sell the subscription at market rates. Renewals will also be handled by the partner.
This program is open to Oracle Gold partners or higher. To qualify they would need to be specialized in the cloud service.
“The real opportunity here is for the channel partners to add their own consulting services around it like change management. By being specialized, it gives them the opportunity to make money off the subscription and to sell to the line of business manager who typically does not have an IT staff. Those customers will transact with a partner, but also they will want the channel partner to manage it for them,” Porter said.
Borellis added that at the Partner Kickoff event, Oracle will be training channel partners on how to properly sell to the C-suite customer.
“The emphasis here is to help the channel partner get beyond the CIOs or the IT departments to the line of business managers in HR or marketing that are now making critical buying decisions,” he said.