The new program lets strictly vetted MSPs package the Oracle platform with both Oracle and non-Oracle apps into a single price, and offers additional sales and marketing support.
Sanjay Sinha, vice president, Platform Products, Oracle
Today at Oracle OpenWorld, Oracle has announced the creation of the Oracle Cloud Managed Service Provider (MSP) Program within the Oracle PartnerNetwork. While the initial roster of partners announced is pretty much limited to larger systems integrators, the company says its plans for the program are broader than that. While meeting strict criteria is necessary to qualify, the plan is to include regional and local partners as well.
“We are seeing many customers looking to move both Oracle and non-Oracle workloads to a public cloud for its benefits, but they need help to do so,” said Sanjay Sinha, vice president, Platform Products, Oracle. “This MSP program is designed to help qualified partners to offer them a complete managed service solution for workloads running on Oracle Platform as a Service and Infrastructure as a Service.”
The program lets partners buy Oracle Cloud Platform, package their MSP services with it, and sell the bundle a streamlined business model.
“Oracle provides the Cloud Platform while the partners provide the MSP services,” Sinha said. “The program makes it easier for partners to offer one contract to the customer.”
Oracle has offered a Business Process Services program, but Sinha said that this program goes further than that one.
“The focus of BPS has been around Oracle’s applications,” he said. “They can offer an outcome-based contract, but all just in the context of Oracle applications. This program covers anything that is running on our cloud platform, regardless of whether it is Oracle or not. We anticipate that probably only around 25 per cent of it will be Oracle.”
In order to qualify for the program, partners must meet the conditions of an Oracle Cloud MSP Partner Validation Checklist. Sinha said this requires a fairly high level of criteria, which will be audited by a third party
“It involves demonstrating deep expertise in building cloud-native applications, as well as the ability to lift and share existing workloads from on-prem to cloud, and demonstrating knowledge of Oracle IaaS and PaaS products, and passing OPN tests to show those skills,” he said.
“We want to make sure partners who qualify have deep expertise in Oracle, so they can do this successfully,” Sinha added. “They will have the required technical expertise as well as deep experience in having done automation.”
Oracle announced an initial list of partners participating in the program — Accenture, Atos, Cognizant, Deloitte, Fujitsu, Hitachi, Infosys, NTT / Dimension Data, TCS, Tech Mahindra, and Wipro. There is a strong bias here to large system integrators, but Sinha emphasized that this is not just a program for them.
“We created the program, not just for large SIs, but also for regional partners, and local partners selling into the mid-market and enterprise,” Sinha said. “We started with the SI partners because they are deep expertise partners, with broad geo coverage. But it is an open program. You have to qualify. There are stringent criteria. But if you are deeply focused in this area, you can get into the program even if you are a smaller partner.”
In addition to being able to offer the bundled price with the platform and services. Oracle Cloud MSP partners will receive sales and go-to-market support. To this end, today OPN also unveiled the Oracle Cloud MSP Knowledge Zone, providing partners with key enablement resources and support.
“Pay as you go pricing is also part of the program.” Sinha said. “The partner essentially becomes the customer, doing all the service administration.”
Partners in the program can also use Oracle Managed Service Provider branding to promote their expertise to customers.
“Because of the vetting we are doing on partners in the program, customers can be confident that they have deep knowledge of the Oracle platform as well as cloud proficiency,” Sinha said.
