Partners Urged To Enhance Profiles In Oracle's Online Solution Catalog

Oracle has overhauled the partner directory portion of its online Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN) system in a bid to encourage more partners to participate.

Where before the OPN Solutions Catalog had profiles for only about 25 percent of Oracle's partners, Oracle is now creating profiles for all 21,000-plus of its partners worldwide, leaving it to partners to "opt out" of the directory, if they choose.

"It's one of our key benefits for our partners," said Kimmeri Kincaid, senior OPN director, in an interview. The OPN Solutions Catalog, which gets more than 30,000 unique visitors every month, is designed to make it easier for potential customers to find solution providers with products and services that meet their business needs.

Oracle studied user behavior on the OPN site, along with best practices on other sites, and came up with the site enhancement plans. Oracle then sought feedback from partners last fall on the proposed changes before they were implemented, Kincaid said.

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Oracle has created basic "default" profiles for all of its partners using information taken from their OPN applications, Kincaid said. Partners can edit and expand their profiles -- or opt out if they choose. The OPN site uses LinkedIn as a model, letting partners can add customer references and recommendations to their profiles, for example.

Partners also now have the ability to see how many times their profile has been accessed, making it possible to judge whether changes they've made are attracting potential customers.

Along with the enhanced profile management tools, Oracle has made a number of improvements to the OPN Solutions Catalog, including making it easier for partners and customers to navigate and filter search results. Kincaid said the site also has better demand-generation capabilities that work in conjunction with partner profiles.

The site offers tabs that help customers find partners who have been certified through Oracle's "specialized" program or "Exastack-ready" partners who work with Oracle's engineered systems, such as the Exadata database server and Exalogic cloud server.

The site also serves up Oracle news related to a search and information about upcoming Oracle events. And Kincaid said the new site does a better job of working with international languages, relying on browser preferences to better translate the OPN pages.

"The enhanced format takes things to a whole new level," said Kirby Lunger, senior vice resident of sales, marketing and alliances at Performance Architects, a Boston-based business and technology consulting company and Oracle Platinum partner. Lunger, whose company has used the OPN site for a number of years, specifically cited the streamlined interface as a major gain.

The new OPN Solutions Catalog site has been live since last month, but Oracle held off formally launching the site to give partners a chance to update and edit their profiles. "We've already seen a lot of activity," Kincaid said.