In an age of rapid technological change, delivering valuable solutions to customers in a timely and simplified manner is demanded.
Cognizant of the complex needs of enterprises today, Oracle is seeking to demonstrate its ability to solve customer problems via a partner-first approach with a wide-ranging solutions launch at its annual Oracle CloudWorld.
Speaking to Channel Asia at a pitstop in Singapore, Oracle’s customer success officer and executive vice president of its Customer Success Services arm, Gary Miller, indicated the need to package an all-round solution stack to help customers derive utmost value.
He proposes that Oracle’s customer success strategy should provide a seamless experience across all layers of the Oracle stack, including Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), software-as-a-service (SaaS) and industry applications.
“We put Customer Success Services together to help make it easier for customers after they have made the decision to consume the technology, while working with partners as well, and have one team that can help them get the most value,” he explained.
Evolving market demand
Specific to its advancements in the artificial intelligence field, the company’s AI strategy has been tactically embedded in every layer of its tech stack, intended to make it easier for customers to start exploring AI capabilities.
With support from partners, Miller believes Oracle can guide customers in leveraging embedded AI for complex problem-solving, citing established use cases such as damaged goods management and real-time visual data analysis. Ultimately, the goal is to enable new automation of processes and value creation.
Echoing the company’s strategic vision, Lalit Malik, Oracle’s group vice president of alliances & channels for Asia Pacific, identified four emerging customer trends which are giving Oracle and its partners an opportunity to meet shifting business priorities.
The first trend is a desire by enterprises to modernise their data platforms. Malik shared strong convictions that Oracle and its partners are “uniquely positioned” to help their customers “manage, transact, analyse, integrate, share, and garner insight” from their data.
At the same time, he posits that Oracle is prepared to satisfy the second trend of enterprises investing in AI and application innovation.
“Customers can leverage Oracle’s full AI stack to build intelligent cloud native or low-code apps. They can extend existing applications or create even custom applications,” he added.
The third trend he sees is a growing number of customers seeking a data centre exit. Malik noted that Oracle and it partners are assisting customers with migrating both Oracle and non-Oracle workloads, both in the customer or cloud providers’ data centres.
Lastly, Malik recognised that some organisations are still held back by legacy estate or infrastructure, hence the vendor is working with its partners to upgrade customers’ on-premise estate to the cloud – specifically, tapping on Oracle’s multi-cloud strategy for modernisation with OCI and database cloud services.
Zooming into the framework for partners to fulfil these customer consumption patterns, Malik provided three focus areas – delivering solution innovation, driving business impact and, recalling Oracle’s vision once again, customer success.
He asserted that the key requirement or approach for Oracle is to “co-innovate with partners” to deliver an end-to-end customer solution.
Following that, as they bring innovation to market, “creating differentiation” for customers against their competitors will be a point of collaboration as well.
“The focus here is to make the customer have a competitive edge or advantage as they go to market with their products and services leveraging Oracle solutions,” Malik added.
“We work with partners in handholding customers through their transformation journey to maximise their return on investment with Oracle technology and to achieve better success.”
Preparing for a new cloud and AI era
Ascribing the current cloud market as a “dynamic” one, Miller found that cloud adoption rates within the APAC region are on an upward trend.
From government bodies and large enterprises to smaller businesses, he determined that organisations across the board are seeing the benefits of the cloud, in part, to support AI journeys, with some customers in the region such as in Indonesia and Sri Lanka jumping to the cloud even faster than other mature economies.
Putting a spotlight on multi-cloud, Malik also acknowledged that customers do not want to be tied to a single vendor and he believes that most enterprise customers will come to embrace a multi-cloud strategy.
“At Oracle, we truly embrace multi-cloud to allow our enterprise customers to have more options to run their workloads in the cloud in the way that works best for them,” he said.
“Our Oracle cloud infrastructure provides several products and services to simplify the deployment of multi-cloud solutions that can be delivered by our partners, for example, Oracle Database@Azure. With Oracle Database@Azure, you can run your application or Kubernetes on Azure and you can run Oracle Database on Oracle infrastructure, and it’s co-located with very low to no latency at all.”
However, while there is eagerness on the customer side and a variety of solutions available, some partners still battle with skill shortages that impede them from meeting customer demand.
In light of this, education for partners is top-of-mind for the vendor as Miller, who spearheads Oracle University – its platform for training and certification – revealed active plans to share IP with partners and collaborating with them to generate an “embedded, go-to-market delivery model”.
“We have a mantra with our partners and customers which is we want to get it right the first time,” he shared.
“That means they have to be educated and experienced, and we need to have a working model with the customer, the partner and Oracle. In some cases, we’re all working together towards a common goal which is making the customer successful.”
Outside of the ecosystem, Oracle has also invested in early education to prepare the workforce for an evolving technology landscape. For example, this past month, Oracle inked a deal with the Singapore government to train up to 10,000 students and professionals in the latest digital technologies including artificial intelligence (AI), cloud, cybersecurity and data science by 2027.
Malik also agreed that producing value can only happen if partner skill sets are available to deliver the projects and emphasised that Oracle takes partner readiness “very seriously”.
“Asia Pacific is the hub of readiness. If you look at our certifications, we run sales certifications, pre-sale certifications, and implementation, hands-on certifications for partners. We have grown triple digits in our certifications in the last 12 months,” he noted.
According to Oracle, the number of people taking up Oracle’s cloud and SaaS certification has increased by 66 percent, with more than half of its cloud certifications globally coming from APAC. Malik clarified further that a large proportion rests in India and, to some extent, in ASEAN.
Accelerating partner profitability
By providing what Miller calls a “complete ecosystem” of solutions and services, Oracle is poised to enable partners to build profitability.
“If we focus on customer success – and that means not over-complicating or over-customising – we can get the optimal solution for the customer the first time and we get the customer to value faster,” said Miller.
He explained that with customer success “at the centre of everything” in Oracle’s strategy, partners together with Oracle can lead customers to reap value and business benefit earlier which will open up customers’ capacity to add investments into future projects, thereby stimulating a faster and continuous buying process.
Meanwhile, Malik also touted Oracle’s “unique differentiation” that will increase customer confidence and partner profitability. Apart from its solutions, Oracle ensures its partners are trained to deliver customer projects on time or ahead of time. As partners make money on services, they are likely to invest more with Oracle, creating a profit cycle which Malik believes helps partners attain resilience and profitability.
In addition, part of growing customer loyalty and satisfaction is recognising the economic environment that organisations are operating in, where controlling costs is a key factor in today’s business decisions.
“By providing superior cloud economics and no hidden costs in deploying workloads on OCI, partners can better deliver cloud projects on time and on target while saving costs for the customers,” Malik elaborated.
“With a wide range of deployment options and multi-cloud offerings, partners are also better able to provide cost-effective solutions to their customers’ needs and within the budget constraint.”
Looking ahead, Miller remains “bullish” on the prospect of delivering maximum customer success and Malik is, likewise, positive at meeting regional expectations due to APAC being a “growth engine”.
“I think we enjoy a lot of growth in the region and a lot of stability as well. This allows our partners to continue to engage with our customers to deliver cost-effective and innovative solutions, and, leveraging on these innovations and scalability in the cloud, to drive better business efficiency, whilst driving the cost down to keep the cost low and keep the lights on.”