Credit: supplied
A vibrant partner ecosystem is playing a critical role in Oracle’s cloud success, centered on customer outcomes and taking the focus beyond the technology that supports it.
“We’ve had double digit growth across all lines of business, even tripling some very strong business,” Oracle senior vice president of cloud engineering for Japan and Asia Pacific Alistair Green said.
“Central to all of this and a central theme at [Oracle conference CloudWorld 2022] was customer outcomes, not technology, but how we enable outcomes and do that with our partners.”
During CloudWorld 2022, Oracle revealed it was opening up its enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications platform to customer developers and partners, giving them access to the same tools that Oracle’s own development team uses to extend and personalise applications to fit unique customer needs.
Infrastructure platform Oracle Alloy was also launched, geared for service providers, integrators, and independent software vendors (ISV) that want to roll out Oracle cloud services to their customers. With Alloy, a provider can essentially white-label Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) and offer branded infrastructure and platform services.
“We’re really moving towards an ‘open’ Oracle,” Green said. “There’s also a growing push that Oracle has more than anyone else in the industry for a multi-cloud solution and we are truly enabling that.”
Oracle managing director of Australia and New Zealand alliances and channels Robert Gosling added it was investing in the partner community with enablement and ensuring partners are achieving certifications along with modern IP and expertise.
“We have capacity in the market to meet the demand that is accelerating the success we have in the cloud market,” Gosling said.
Another key focus, Gosling said, was working with partners on go-to-market strategies and breaking it down by geographic location, skill set and industry focus.
“We're looking for two things – gaps in the market that we need to invest in and develop new partners and looking where we have capacity to make sure we're actually working with a sales organisation to help them deliver customer outcomes,” he added.
Cloud growth by the numbers
After years of investments, Oracle’s bet on cloud computing has started to pay off when it showed nearly a third of its revenue in the first quarter of fiscal year 2023 coming from cloud services in September.
Total cloud revenue (software-as-a-service and infrastructure-as-a-service combined) stood at US$3.6 billion in the quarter, up 50 per cent year-on-year.
The vendor expects to hit an annualised revenue run-rate of over US$20 billion combining all of its cloud services, chairman Larry Ellison said at the time, adding that Oracle acquired close to 1,000 new “paying” cloud customers during a three-month period.
Cotton processor Namoi Cotton migrated its JD Edwards apps to OCI in August, upgrading to the latest 9.2 version at a price of $120,000, which is a 60 per cent saving compared to original quotes, Green said.
Auckland-based loyalty, customer relationship management and payment provider Tranxactor Group recently decided to switch to Oracle's cloud from Amazon Web Services (AWS), slashing infrastructure costs.
Cultural shift towards partners
Deloitte consulting partner Peter Nikandrow noticed a cultural shift in Oracle’s collaboration with partners, innovation and agility with customers over the past few months.
“There’s been a huge cultural shift in innovation and customer-centric focus, which aligned to our strategy,” Nikandrow said. “Allowing customers to innovate on top of the application layer is a game changer and shows that Oracle is listening to customers, because sometimes customers can innovate faster than them.”
In June, Oracle acquired healthcare specialist Cerner for US$28.4 billion, expecting it to turn into a massive growth engine in the years to come.
Nikandrow added healthcare was going to be a focus for Deloitte especially feeding into the trend of industry-point solutions.
“If we win a healthcare client, they want to see people that understand Oracle in the healthcare industry environment, they don't want to see a finance-focused person. We're going to continue to invest in aligning our people with specific industries,” he said. “I think as Oracle starts selling more industry focused solutions, people will start organising their expertise by industry.”
