Oracle Briefing 'Specialized' Partners On Sales, Product Strategies

More than 100 Oracle resellers are attending a partner executive summit at the company's Redwood Shores, Calif., headquarters this week where they will get the low-down on Oracle's product roadmap and strategies for selling new products such as the Oracle Database Appliance.

Oracle is touting the event, the second held by the company in recent weeks, as indicative of Oracle's increased commitment to the channel. "It's going to be a packed 24 hours," said Lydia Smyers, vice president, worldwide alliances and channels programs and communications, in an interview.

Hosted by Judson Althoff, senior vice president of worldwide alliances and channels and embedded sales, the Oracle Partner Executive Summit will provide presentations on strategies, product roadmaps and selling opportunities to the more than 100 invited resellers who have won "Specialized" designations in the Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN) program.

Oracle president Mark Hurd is slated to wrap up the event with an update on Oracle's sales strategies.

The selling strategy briefings will focus on recently introduced products including Enterprise Manager 12c, WebLogic 12c, SPARC T4 servers, and the Oracle Database Appliance.

"The Oracle Database Appliance is going to be a big part of this event -- no surprise there," Smyers said.

Partners will be briefed by John Fowler, executive vice president of systems, on Oracle's hardware product development plans; Robert Shimp, group vice president of product marketing, about selling existing Oracle products; and Amit Zavery, vice president of Oracle Fusion Middleware Product Management, on opportunities to sell Oracle Fusion Middleware and cloud products.

Oracle said BIAS Corp., Cintra and MapleSoft are among the attending partners who will be talking about their own sales efforts with Oracle products. "We've found that the Oracle Database Appliance is highly relevant to our customer base and has already proven to be the ideal solution to displace the competition," said BIAS CEO and co-founder Jeff Harvey, in a statement.

Oracle held a similar summit earlier this month in Arizona, called the Oracle Applications and Industry Partner Summit, geared toward systems integrators that work with Oracle products. About 80 partners attended that event.

Oracle is calling these "inaugural" summits with plans to make them regular events. That's in addition to the OPN Forum event held each year in conjunction with the huge Oracle OpenWorld conference in San Francisco.

This week's summit is "more focused on the reselling community rather than the co-selling community," Smyers said.

Oracle also said Monday that it has created an OPN Specialization around its MySQL open-source database, allowing partners to receive training and certification to work with MySQL.