Oracle Changes up PartnerNetwork Perks

Oracle (ORCL) provided a detailed strategy of its fiscal year 2015 plans during its sixth annual Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN) kickoff, where the company revealed its plans to increase partners’ success and grow their businesses. Here is a rundown of announcements made during today’s live virtual session.

Oracle is enhancing its existing OPN enablement resources to give partners access to revised incentive programs aimed at growing partner business with their Oracle sales. While the current OPN Incentive Program provides resellers with quarterly payments for their efforts, the new program will pay out on a monthly basis, with the payment processing time reduced to ensure faster reimbursement. Oracle is increasing its focus on sales for partners who sell Oracle-on-Oracle solutions, and has added the Oracle Virtual Compute Alliance infrastructure system to the Strategic Product List, making it eligible for rebates for the first time.

No partner network revision would be complete without mentioning cloud solutions, and Oracle is no exception—a two-tier distribution program has been added to the Oracle Cloud services portfolio. The program ostensibly will help engage Oracle’s value-added distributors (VADs) and extend its reach into the broader cloud market, according to the announcement.

The company also is extending its Oracle Exastack Ready status program with the addition of Oracle Database Appliance and Oracle Big Data Appliance Ready and Optimized designations. ISVs, the company said, will be able to differentiate their technologies from their competitors by showing that their solutions are either supported through the Oracle Exastack Ready designation or tuned and tested for performance with the Oracle Exastack Optimized designations to deliver speed, scalability and reliability with the company’s suite of engineered systems. So far, more than 1,300 ISV applications have achieved Oracle Exastack Ready status, with an additional 200 ISV applications receiving Oracle Exastack Optimized status.

“Customers are looking for application partners that can deliver the reliability and performance their constituents demand,” said Steve Biondi, group vice president, Worldwide Alliances & Channels, ISV & OEM Sales, Oracle. “By continuing to evolve the Oracle Exastack program we are providing partners the enablement resources and technologies they need to meet their most challenging IT and data management environments.”

Oracle’s latest announcements came just days after the company announced it would acquire MICROS systems for $5.3 billion in a bid to increase its presence in the hospitality and retail industries. According to USA Today, the acquisition is the biggest for Oracle since its purchase of Sun Microsystems in 2010 for a whopping $7.4 billion. Last week, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison claimed his company is now the second-largest software-as-a-service provider in the world, with intentions to take the No. 1 spot in both SaaS and PaaS.