Interviews

How Oracle is Betting on its Dual Cloud Region Strategy

India is a key growth market for Oracle. With two cloud regions in the country – first one in Mumbai and the second one in Hyderabad – and a strong channel partner support, the tech major is fully geared to support its 15,000 plus customers in the country in their innovation journey. In an exclusive interview with CXOToday, Sanjoy Mukherjee, Head-Alliances and Channels, Technology, Oracle India explains how the company’s dual cloud region is unfolding business opportunities for partners in the cloud.

CXOToday: What are the latest trends you’re seeing in the channel ecosystem in India?

Sanjoy Mukherjee: From Oracle’s perspective, India has always been a strong adoption ground for a lot of our services partners. And in the last few years, we’ve seen Indian IT services firms address a good chunk of our global customer base jointly. Partners appreciate our clear focus on customer-centricity and are walking shoulder-to-shoulder with us in our cloud path.

CXOToday: How are your partners helping to drive the next big cloud growth for Oracle?

Sanjoy Mukherjee: More and more Indian organizations are looking to improve their business resilience and quickly get back onto the growth track, with cloud-led innovation. In the current situation, industry experts are anticipating a surge in demand for secure cloud services. With our dual local cloud region strategy, Oracle is best poised to cater to this demand. And we see partners playing a big role in fulfilling this demand. Our partners are looking to enhance their engagement with Oracle and help their end customers realize extreme performance, greater security and increased cost savings via Oracle Cloud.

CXOToday: Can you offer an update on the revamped Oracle Partner Network (OPN) 2020 and how it’s empowering partners?

Sanjoy Mukherjee: We’ve modernized our partner program with Oracle Partner Network (OPN) 2020.The enhanced OPN program has been designed to accelerate our partners’ own transition to cloud as well as drive superior customer experience and business outcomes. OPN 2020 includes different Partner Tracks: 

  • Cloud Sell track, where we have cloud partners that come with great customer relationships, join us and participate in business development for IaaS, PaaS and SaaS.
  • Service track partners are focused on providing complimentary services that all our cloud services require or those our customers require.
  • Build track for independent software vendors (ISVs) and other partners that provide commercially available products and/or services built on or integrated with Oracle Cloud
  • License and Hardware Resale Track for License & Hardware Resale

Since the launch of the program, our partners have appreciated the clarity and focus of these tracks. And from our perspective, with these tracks, we are committed to address different segments with a sharp focus on different areas of the business. Partners have complete choice of which track they would like to focus on, based on their organization’s focus areas and growth strategy. Additionally, we are also able to provide them the extended services – such as requirements that they ask for, be it universal credits for developing their cloud offerings on our cloud platform or may be pertaining to specific new offerings as per their go-to-market and customer needs.

CXOToday: How is Oracle supporting partners, especially during the current challenging environment?

Sanjoy Mukherjee: Oracle continues to work closely with all its partners to ensure their business continuity. All our partner-centric initiatives are driven under the umbrella of OPN 2020 program. Moreover, we have also ensured that we are enabling our partners through digital learning initiatives. In fact, we have certain dedicated avenues where they can learn, get certified, access resources – whether it is sales, pre-sales, other certifications etc. Whatever we are doing internally, we are sharing that knowledge with our partners digitally, while providing them an opportunity to get necessary certifications. 

Oracle Digital Marketing Centre (OMDC) is a modern marketing automation platform that provides our Oracle Partner Network (OPN) community a suite fully integrated digital marketing tactics. Itcomprises ready-to-execute Oracle marketing campaigns and content designed to enhance partners’ go-to-market strategy, improve results and strengthen a partner’s brand. A number of our partners are also taking advantage of OMDC services. 

CXOToday: Please tell us about your roadmap to strengthen and expand partner network.

Sanjoy Mukherjee: Having launched our OPN 2020 recently, we will continue to focus on the below three core tenets while engaging with our partners:

  • Customer centricity: In order to help partners showcase their expertise and enable customers to identify partners that will deliver value for their specific needs
  • Success driven approach: This includes increased investments in enablers designed to build expertise to drive customer success, grow partner revenue and accelerate path to cloud
  • Simplified process: It streamlines program makes it easier for partners to engage with Oracle and leverage the industry’s broadest and most integrated cloud and on-premise portfolio.

Partners account for around 80% of all Oracle transactions in one way or another, especially in Asia Pacific; so they are definitely one of our key stakeholders when it comes to driving growth for Oracle Cloud. We precisely understand that each of the players are different – an ISV is different from an SI, and services focus versus the reseller focus and what it means from a customer relationship perspective. That is why we are able to cater to all of them in a better way while driving success for them and their end-customers. Additionally, we will continue to constantly invest in reskilling and upskilling our partners for a cloud-first world.

CXOToday: What does the dual region strategy mean to Oracle partners in India? How will it help expand your partners’ business?

Sanjoy Mukherjee: With two Oracle Cloud regions live in India now (in Mumbai and Hyderabad) we are fully geared to support our huge customer base in the country. Customers are now better able to adhere to the regulatory requirements around data sovereignty and data residency. We are already witnessing rising demand from across sectors for our second generation cloud and we are quite confident that more cloud adoption will help our partner’s business. It will help partners enhance their services capabilities as well. 

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Sohini Bagchi
Sohini Bagchi is Editor at CXOToday, a published author and a storyteller. She can be reached at [email protected]