**Editor’s Note: Click here for a list of August’s important channel-program changes you should know.**

ORACLE OPENWORLD — With Monday’s announcement of the Oracle Cloud Managed Service Provider Program (OCMSP), the cloud-focused vendor is looking for Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN) partners with Oracle Cloud expertise and the requisite skills to build, deploy, run and manage workloads on Oracle public cloud.

The announcement was made at Oracle OpenWorld, being held this week in San Francisco.

To date, there are a handful of early participants in the OCMSP who for the past few months have helped fine-tune it — Accenture, Altos, Cognizant, Deloitte, Fujitsu, Hitachi, Infosys, NTT/Dimension Data, TCS, Tech Mahindra, and Wipro, according to the company.

“We’ve created this program to meet the requirements of our enterprise and midmarket customers who are planning for digital transformation and want to outsource the project,” said Sanjay Sinha, vice president platform products at Oracle.

The new cloud program will be very selective, accepting only those partners with the skills and infrastructure to build, deploy, run and manage both Oracle and non-Oracle workloads. That means deep expertise in cloud; the ability to migrate both Oracle and non-Oracle workloads from on premises to Oracle public cloud; offer 7/24 support, monitoring, ITIL processes, change management and incident reporting; API integration between their toolsets; the Oracle Cloud platform from provisioning and monitoring workloads and automation; and the ability to offer a single multi-year contract for outcome based pricing.{ad}

Partner requirements also include proficiency with Oracle IaaS and PaaS products. Oracle OCMSP partners will purchase Oracle IaaS or PaaS for their customers and package the managed services in a single turnkey solution.

Sinha expects the partner validation process to take several months and require partners to meet the conditions of an Oracle Cloud MSP Partner Validation Checklist, which will be audited by a third party.

A recent report from 451 Research found that managed services at cloud service providers are expected to grow from $17 billion in 2014 to $43 billion in 2018.

Some suggested value-added services for cloud MSPs in Oracle’s new program: cloud advisory, service migration, DevOps, provisioning and orchestration, monitoring, 24×7 monitoring, incident and change management, and cloud optimization, to name a handful.

While the initial program participants represent large global MSPs, Oracle is also looking for regional and local cloud MSPs to cater to enterprise and midmarket customers.

Existing OPN partners have access to training and enablement resources to help them work toward becoming an OCMSP. As an OCMSP, partners can expect sales and go-to-market support and promote their offering with specific Oracle Managed Service Provider branding.

Also Monday, Oracle announced its Cloud MSP Knowledge Zone, where partners have access to enablement resources and support while in the OCMSP program.