Oracle: How partners can make the most out of Cloud ERP services
Oracle vice president of financial product strategy, Terrance Wampler, was recently in Australia to meet with local partners and share how partners globally were successfully winning customer Cloud ERP implementations.
Wampler highlighted Cloud implementations have a different business model and it wanted partners understand how they're going to make money out of business advisory services, standardising requirements, integrations and building out custom apps on its platform-as-a-service.
"They're also going to make money on managed services post-implementation as Cloud offers this continuous improvement program where the product can evolve quickly. That allows them to bring on those advisory services to take up new features and offer more value to the customer," he said.
"As Oracle transforms from a license to a service business, partners need to transform their consultancy services from a licensed model to a Cloud model, and we have to figure out how to help them do that."
As a result, the volume of business and implementation services value will change, Wampler said, but there's a huge opportunity to gain revenue through these other avenues.
"My intent is to help the Australian market and our Oracle ecosystem understand how successful our business is and how we can grow our business in Australia," he said.
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According to Wampler, partners need to improve their confidence in providing Cloud services followed by their sales execution and then focus on Cloud skills.
"All the partners that I've met in Australia, their Cloud ERP practices are in their infancy," Wampler said.
"You need to build your practice first before you build your skills up, meaning that you've got to have a mindset of recommending Cloud and approach Cloud as-a-service with capabilities."
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Wampler highlighted the vendor's global success with Cloud-based ERP, but said it needed to 'bootstrap' its strategy more in the Australian market.
To date, Oracle has trained more than 350 partner organisations globally and more than 25,000 individual consultants.
"As Oracle, we think we've mastered what a Cloud or a service business means and it's not just apps, it's technology and infrastructure," he said. "We've figured out already what that business model looks like, but I don't think that we've figured how the ecosystem should best grow to support it."
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Recently, Oracle announced that it hired more than 800 new salespeople in Asia Pacific in an effort to capitalise on the growth of the Cloud computing market in the region.
In its fiscal fourth-quarter results announced in June, the vendor's Cloud revenue achieved more than $US2.3 billion annual run rate, selling $US426 million in new Software as a Service (SaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) business during the quarter.