Oracle talks up double digit growth in ANZ ahead of today’s partner summit

Oracle has talked up its double digital growth in its business lines in Australia and New Zealand in the last year, ahead of its partner kick-off event at Barangaroo in Sydney today.

With Oracle's regional managing director for ANZ Cherie Ryan departing the business due to personal reasons, CRN spoke to interim lead Alistair Green, SVP Cloud Engineering, Japan & Asia Pacific, and Oracle's general manager, alliance and channels, Robert Gosling about Oracle's local progress and partner strategy.

Oracle's public cloud regions in Sydney and Melbourne are "yielding very positive, strong growth for us," according to Green. Globally, Oracle topped Wall Street estimates for quarterly profit and revenue earlier this year, reporting that its infrastructure business had entered a “hyper-growth phase”.

Today in Sydney, Oracle partners are hearing more about what’s driving that growth. On the event agenda is an Oracle strategy update and more about the slew of Oracle products and features announced at the company’s CloudWorld 2022 event in the US last week. They will also hear from Oracle line of business leaders on strategy and expectations from partners and the vendor’s channel strategy, programs and incentive schemes.

Approximately 150 people are registered to attend today’s event, which will be the first such face-to-face Oracle partner kick-off in Australia since 2019.

Oracle’s Australian partnership strategy focuses on market gaps, partner’s industry specialisation, skills and location, said Gosling.

“When we have joint customers that we find fit in that matrix, we look into how we can build a go-to market strategy with those partners, and with the customer? That has been hugely successful over the last twelve months,” Gosling said.

“For example, in Queensland ... we know the state government has a number of PeopleSoft applications. So we want to look in Queensland for partners who've got certification for migrating PeopleSoft OCI, they’re in Queensland and they’ve got an industry focus on state government.”

This strategy has been “hugely successful”, according to Gosling, who said 76 percent of Oracle SaaS implementations and six out of ten of all workloads migrated to OCI are by partners.

Oracle’s Service Delivery Accelerator offers outcome-based incentives for partners who achieve expertise in a certain product domain. They can tag that workload to receive a rebate based on consumption. As they manage and grow that workload they can earn further rebates.

Gosling also spruiked Oracle Lift Services, which partners and customers can use to augment projects with skilled cloud engineers.

He also flagged that partner upskilling is a key KPI for Oracle, which provides free and funded programs to achieve this.

Also on Gosling’s agenda is building strategic relationships with cloud consulting services providers, as is driving ISVs to OCI.

Wins announced this year by Oracle in Australia include Namoi Cotton, which migrated its Oracle JD Edwards apps to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). Other wins include New Zealand-based retail and hospitality technology ISV Tranxactor, which moved from AWS to Oracle, and Australian-based healthcare solution provider Aspen Medical, which consolidated its business processes with Oracle. The University of Melbourne has an edge computing and IoT research lab running on OCI.

Last week at the Oracle CloudWorld event in the US, CEO Larry Ellison talked up the “tumbling down” of cloud providers’ “walled gardens” and Oracle’s MySQL HeatWave database working with AWS and Azure.