Oracle Adds Specializations To Bring Oracle, Sun VARs Closer

The new offerings highlight the opportunities channel partners have to sell Oracle products to Sun's customer base and Sun products to businesses that use Oracle software, said Judson Althoff, senior vice president of global alliances and channels at Oracle.

Oracle acquired Sun in January for $7.4 billion, and Oracle is now integrating Sun's operations and its product lines with its own. Althoff said the new Sun training and certification offerings deliver on Oracle's promise to quickly integrate the Sun partner community into the Oracle Partner Network (OPN) program.

"So Sun partners can invest in OPN and know there's a deep commitment to the Sun product line," Althoff said in an interview prior to the Thursday news.

Last year Oracle revamped OPN, providing resellers with the chance to become certified or "specialized" in specific Oracle technologies. Specializations are optional for Gold-designated partners and a requirement to become a Platinum partner.

Althoff said about 10 percent of the 25,000 solution providers in OPN have already elected to try for Platinum status (they have 12 months to do so) while another 10 percent to 15 percent of Gold partners are working toward certification in at least one specialization.

Thursday Oracle unveiled 15 product specializations partners can become certified in, bringing the total to more than 35 that will be available by the end of May, Althoff said. Among the new specializations are six focused on Sun technology: Sun SPARC Enterprise entry-level and midrange servers, Sun SPARC Enterprise high-end servers, Sun Chip Multithreading servers, Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage Systems, StorageTek tape libraries and Oracle Solaris.

Althoff said Sun partners resell those products and have invested a great deal in developing skills around them. Oracle already allows channel partners with deep skills in specialization areas to skip training and take certification exams. Althoff said that will hold true for Sun partners and Oracle is even allowing some certification exams that resellers took with Sun before the acquisition to count toward becoming certified in Oracle specializations.

"We anticipate that a significant number of them will prequalify," he said. And he believed that all Sun partners interested in becoming certified in a specialization "are capable of making it."

Only about one-third of the combined partner base have skills in both Oracle and Sun technologies, Althoff estimated.

While Oracle has said it will serve Sun's 4,000 biggest accounts directly, Althoff said that still leaves more than 30,000 Sun customers that Oracle is counting on the channel to service. He also noted that Oracle has some 300,000 software customers served by channel partners who do not use Sun hardware.

That means there are a lot of cross-sell opportunities for Oracle software and Sun hardware solution providers. Althoff pointed to the Sun Chip Multithreading servers and Sun SPARC Enterprise midrange servers as the biggest opportunities for Sun partners in the Oracle market. As for the Oracle Solaris specialization: "This is really meant to enable partners to leverage the investment they've already made [in the operating system]," Althoff said.

Other new specializations being launched cover Oracle Policy Automation and Oracle CRM On Demand applications, Oracle Database Security, Oracle Data Warehousing, Oracle Essbase, Oracle Business Intelligence Foundation, Oracle Application Grid, Oracle Content Management and Oracle Web Center.

Solution providers are looking forward to the opportunities to bring legacy Oracle and legacy Sun products together into customer solutions, whether it means getting the necessary training and certifications to do it themselves or partnering with others who have the required expertise.

Oracle has always done a good job in terms of getting its existing partner base to carry products from acquired companies and getting its new partners from acquired companies to invest in Oracle products, said Don Landrum, vice president of CD Group, a Norcross, Ga.-based solution provider.

CD Group depends on Oracle products, especially the legacy J.D. Edwards and PeopleSoft products, for about 98 percent of its business but is not interested in working with Sun products, Landrum said.

Oracle's message about working with Sun hardware is not an invalid one, Landrum said. "Just like Oracle has done with all their acquisitions, Oracle will put incentives out there to put in its entire stack of products. We'll leverage as much as we can."

Landrum said he expects to be partnering with legacy Sun solution providers to handle the hardware requirements of customers. "That's the alternative for us," he said.

For its part, Chicago-based solution provider and Oracle software partner Rolta TUSC is already working with Oracle's Exadata database appliance, which is based on Sun hardware, as well as Sun's ZFS file system, said Rich Niemiec, president.

The company also has a long history with Sun's Solaris operating system, Niemiec said. "We've packaged Oracle and Sun products where we fit well," he said.

However, for other Sun products, Rolta TUSC has partnered with Sun solution providers from time to time, a situation Niemiec expects will happen more often going forward.

"Oracle has made it more transparent to do that, which is nice for us," he said.

John Murphy, executive vice president of Advanced Systems Group (ASG), a Denver-based solution provider and longtime partner of Sun, said he is all for getting certifications and specializations that help differentiate his business and experience, a rule that holds true regardless of who the vendor is.

ASG has done work in Oracle environments but has more experience working with Sun products, Murphy said.

"A lot of Sun customers run Oracle," he said. "We need to move up the stack and have some work to do."

It is much easier for a legacy Sun solution provider to get experience in the Oracle software stack than it is for an Oracle partner to get ready for Sun hardware, Murphy said.

"In the hardware game, you need Sun knowledge," he said. "But customers also deploy Sun products with EMC storage, or with other server environments. You have to work with all that. A lot of customers have legacy equipment, and not all Sun."

To deal with the hardware side of the business, a solution provider also needs a lab, seed equipment, demo equipment and proofs of concept, Murphy said.

"This can be expensive, and even overwhelming," he said. "Not that it can't be done. For some, it makes sense. But you have to look at market demand. And if you want to get into the hardware, you can't just look at Sun."

Partnering for many is often the best answer, Murphy said.

"We're open to partnering with Oracle VARs," he said. "We'll look at those who have a vertical knowledge we don't have and don't want to have, partners who go beyond the database apps. That would make sense for us. But traditional database resellers, that would be a conflict for us."