As I sit in my home office in the cold Canadian north (well not that far north, just about 60 kilometres west of Toronto), I’m preparing for my upcoming business trip to Latin America (and looking forward to leaving the cold behind). Starting March 1, I’ll be spending 10 days meeting with Value Added Distributors (VADs) in Argentina, Brazil, Colombia and Mexico. Many of the topics we’ll be discussing will revolve around ‘The Acquisition’ (no relation to ‘The Situation’), increasing operational and sales efficiencies, and finally how they and their customers can continue growing their businesses.

Like many manufacturers today we continue to improve our programs and processes with the objective of enabling our channel partners to sell more…more Oracle, more ancillary products and services, more of everything.

The Remarketer Program

One part of our enablement and activation recipe is the Remarketer program. This program is designed to make it EASY to start selling Oracle software.

No Hurdles. No Contracts. No Fees. Just Start Selling. It’s that simple.

For over two and a half years we’ve grown the network of Remarketer Authorized VADs offering the program from 2 to over 70 worldwide and the number of active Remarketer partners having sold Oracle software is in the 2000’s.

In order to keep the program moving, new products and offerings have been added since the original launch in September 2007. Remarketers are authorized to resell select Oracle software; these products are called 1-Click Products. In addition, Remarketers can access a wealth of free information located on the 1-Click Product Solution Kits page. Resellers will find product value propositions, sales training videos, call guides and sales cheat sheets just to name a few of the materials available.

As I mentioned earlier, the list of products available to Remarketers has grown. From the original 5, which includes Standard Edition One and Standard Edition products, we are now up to 21 products!!…you can find the entire list here under the ‘Benefits & Resources’ tab. The newest 1-Click products, AutoVue and Crystal Ball are available via select Remarketer Authorized Value Added Distributors. AutoVue is an enterprise visualization solution, while Crystal Ball provides predictive modeling, forecasting, simulation and optimization. Each of these product lines has a strong following and we encourage resellers interested in these solution areas to investigate them further.

What’s Next?

With the acquisitions pace not slowing down there is always the potential for more mid-market desktop ready type applications or technologies to make their way to this entry level partner zone. That said, the real big deal here is that Remarketer is officially part of OPN Specialized, a partner program that encourages and enables growth. We provide you with the path of least resistance to begin reselling Oracle and from there the sky is the limit. I promised myself I would not use the term ‘Difficult Times’ since it’s quite over used as of late, so I won’t, but I will say that there is no better time to check out Oracle’s partner offerings be it at the Remarketer, Silver, Gold or Platinum levels.

Customer’s are talking, are you listening?

José Fernandez-Stoll is an alliances consultant with Oracle Worldwide Alliances & Channels. Guest blogs such as this one are part of The VAR Guy’s annual sponsorship