Oracle’s Path Forward Depends on the Channel

By the way, if you didn’t know, Oracle is becoming more partner friendly as it builds its cloud focus. The company hasn’t exactly been known for its channel centricity, as Brown notes (Brown, as you may recall, served as channel chief at VMware). That’s changing.

“They are really thinking this through,” Brown says, referring to the way Oracle works with the channel.

“We don’t have a path forward without partners building on us.”

To that end, Oracle doesn’t operate on a partner resale model anymore. Instead, Oracle pays partners who are enrolled and certified in its program. Those partners register solutions they are developing for customers and earn a percentage of that spend as a rebate. End users, meanwhile, buy unified, consumable credits. That way, they know what they are paying and they buy the services they need from partners. And the arrangement seems better for partners, too, because they aren’t consumed by the transaction or its price.

“It’s much, much simpler,” Brown says.

And if cloud itself represents a simpler, more efficient way to do business, it stands to reason that associated channel programs should follow suit.