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Compare Oracle's technology/services strategy to the competition.
I don't think there is a company in the industry that has better technology than Oracle.
We are not into the services business. We are not in here trying to take your services business. We are simply in here trying to give you the best technology and the best products in the world.
On top of that we also integrate them for you and give you a leveragable integrated system to take to market. You have no fear of us competing with you from a services perspective. Those are all yours. And we are glad to work with you to give you the best support experience to your customer that you possibly can.
And if you tell me 'Listen you know I found this company and their products are just better than yours." You should buy those. You should take those to your customers. I think, to the example, you gave: Go piece by piece of the technology stack. Performance. Feature Set. Capabilities. Go through it.
What about the profitability of the Oracle channel program?
Our view is to be very competitive when you do the things I describe, when you get the right levels of attach, the right levels of support. We want our channel programs to be as attractive as anybody (else's) in the industry.
What type of VAR are you looking for and what type of services and model do they need to think about for the future?
Anybody that has got an ability to get at a target market that is incremental coverage for us gets very attractive. So I gave you an example of one level of segmentation by industry.
As I mentioned there are 9,000 banks in the country, 5,000 hospitals, and you can go down the number of colleges and universities. These are all very attractive target markets that are all of keen interest to us. So with the ability to get reach into public sector, with the ability to get reach into city and county governments, the ability to get reach into healthcare, the ability to get reach into banks, into retailers.
All are industries that we have keen interest to that we bring industry value propositions for provided we can get the right level of sophistication in a VAR. Because when you are selling software and even an engineered system it is not as interesting to us to get somebody that is just moving boxes. We need people that want to bring solutions to market. So we have industry groups in the company who are dedicated to vertical industries.
So if you looked at our third and fourth strategies of our strategic plan. Our third strategy is to move through industries. And we have industry groups that build software tailored to industry problems. I'd have no problem integrating those solutions to an ODA (Oracle Database Appliance) onto a solutions set and moving it through channels.
Now can we do that from an engineering, a value prop, an economic perspective? Yes. The challenge becomes finding the right profile of VAR who can now take that to market and can represent that and sell it. And if they are there, we are extremely interested.
So you have 30 percent of the partners now specialized depending on geography where do you want to see it?
The more focused the partner the better for me. There is nothing wrong with general partners and so forth but the real magic for us would be the ability to get agreement on going to this target market with this value proposition, that for us is incremental space for us to cover, taking our stuff to places we are not.
We would be glad to wrap an attractive economic proposition around that for the partner and get agreement that this is where we are going. We will have our channel teams in our regions help the partner. But the deeper the business plan the better for us.
What is your message to (Oracle Channel Chief) Judson (Althoff) and his team on that goal for specialization?
In the end we want to sell more stuff. We want more market share. I am not going to tell you that I am so obsessed with it's got to be 40 percent, 50 percent, 60 percent. I think every quality partner we can get who will go after a vertical market that will further our distribution is attractive to us.
NEXT: Mark Hurd On Growing The Direct Sales Force and Partner Base Both By 25 Percent
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