Channel partners are turning to emerging technologies like AI/ML, IoT, and blockchain among others to unlock new areas of growth, improve productivity and boost innovation. As a channel-focused company, Oracle too believes its partners – with deep domain expertise – have a key role to play in the new decade. The vendor supports and invests in its partners to help them acquire new cloud capabilities so as to keep pace with customers’ ever-evolving needs and demands.
In an exclusive interaction with Channel Times, Sanjoy Mukherjee – Head Alliances & Channels, Oracle India, talks about how the company is strengthening its partner network, with a focus on how the company is collaborating with channel partners to help customers in their cloud journey.
Channel Times: What are the latest emerging tech trends?
Sanjoy Mukherjee: Customers are looking to explore newer use cases with emerging technologies. As they get more and more data-driven, several customers are looking to embed intelligence into their organization’s fabric, taking advantage of AI/ML. Also, they’re continuing to focus on driving increased operational efficiencies and unlock maximum value from IT.
Channel Times: What are Oracle’s growth drivers for 2020?
Sanjoy Mukherjee: We are focused on helping our customers at every step in their cloud journey with our holistic cloud services. We’re empowering their digital journeys with generational innovations like Oracle Autonomous Database, available exclusively on our Gen 2 Cloud. We’ll help more customers upgrade to our Cloud ERP suite as well as take advantage of our enterprise-grade, high performance cloud services, while helping them improve their organization’s overall information security fabric.
Channel Times: How crucial are channel partners for Oracle?
Sanjoy Mukherjee: Partners account for almost 40% of our overall revenue and nearly 80% of our transactions globally. So partners will certainly play an important part in our cloud growth in the new decade. Our customers look to us and our partners to accelerate the growth of our cloud business. We closely collaborate with our partners, providing them with technical and go-to-market support. There’s a lot of focus on domain expertise because in an experiential economy, we go deep, and as per the customer’s demand our partners who work with them understand the business priority more deeply including their pain points and drive business outcomes accordingly. With our initiatives, we try to build in cloud expertise, vertical market offerings, and success with customers through new tiers of recognition and progressive benefits for partners.
Channel Times: What is Oracle’s channel engagement strategy and partner program benefits?
Sanjoy Mukherjee: We have made specific interventions to strengthen our partner network and expand our partner ecosystem, skilling/reskilling them for the cloud economy. Working closely with ISV’s/Cloud platform partners, we join forces to help customers get the maximum value from our cloud.
In 2020, we will continue to focus more on our license business with our existing partners, Global SI’s, ISV’s, Regional SI’s and resellers. Late last year, we introduced our revamped Oracle Partner Network 2020 program– it’s completely customer-centric, success-driven and simplified. It’s a cloud-first modern partner program that accelerates their transition to cloud, driving superior customer experience and business outcomes.
Channel Times: How can midsize channel partners in India gain from Oracle’s Autonomous cloud services?
Sanjoy Mukherjee: A large number of Indian businesses (some existing Oracle customers, some net new) are upgrading to Oracle Autonomous Database and these early adopters are already starting to achieve increased performance, availability and security, at a much lower cost. We have a great set of partners including midsize ones that are helping our customers take advantage of the power of Oracle Autonomous Database. As a result, partners have been able to further strengthen their relationships with customers and gain more opportunities to support customers in their cloud journeys.
Channel Times: Why is Indian midsize SIs investing in making their workforce and customers ready for the autonomous cloud era?
Sanjoy Mukherjee: The biggest advantage if autonomous cloud services is they free up your most important resource – people – from performing mundane tasks and eliminating human error. Midsize and small companies can better utilize 80% of the time their workforce otherwise spend on routine IT management, and redeploy them to focus on more quality and higher value work for the business. This will help unlock innovation with a broader spectrum of intelligent resources and empower the organization to focus more on core priorities -such as accelerating innovation, lowering costs, reducing risks, fast-tracking the insights-to-decision cycle and delivering more value to the business, in turn helping in delivering more value to customers.