Oracle's New Partner Path

The idea of these new territories is that the Oracle reps and partner reps team-sell solutions or value—not just products—to customers.

"We are looking for partners to come forward. They have to be willing to make the investment. We even calculated at X margin how much does this territory have to generate to support a partner. For us, it's almost like committing revenue to them," Ochs said. "They have to commit to being disciplined, to participate in demand generation, to put people on the phone and prospect, to dedicate at least one salesperson to work the territory, to accept a quota, and they have to report back to us on the pipeline. This is very much a discipline thing."

One goal is to fatten up deals. Where a customer might be interested in a database, there will be an attempt to broaden that out and sell applications, middleware and services as well. "We're teaching the silver bullets for broadening the deal," Ochs said.

Current partners who know about the program say the message is right, but the devil is in the details.

"There's always some smoke and mirrors on these things," said another Oracle partner, who requested anonymity. "It sounds really good. They want you to dedicate manpower and become what would be an all-indirect extension of the Oracle field force. But the issue is it's all voluntary on the part of the Oracle regional execs—it's not a top-down mandate and not enforced," he said. "A lot of those [Oracle] managers do not want to go to their people and say, 'Oh, by the way, we're taking this part of your patch away."

Past efforts to cut partners in on more Oracle business have had mixed results. At one point, Oracle opened up enterprise accounts with revenue of up to $1 billion to partners. Before that, partners could sell into accounts with up to $200 million in revenue. But the new cutoff point didn't do much because it was implemented during the dot-com bust and no one was buying software either direct or indirect.

One source involved with partner training in one of the pilots is very jazzed about the prospects. "They're saying all the right things. The Oracle reps will make their nut based on partner sales and partner sales only," he said.

Oracle and partner sales reps alike have to learn more about selling the company's upcoming Fusion middleware—the application server, business process execution language (BPEL) and interconnect software that will knit together the company's now-diverse product lineup.

"Many people still don't know what Fusion is," one partner said.