Oracle Alloy Upgrade: Interaction - Siddharth Idnani, Alliance & Channels, Oracle India

Oracle, a global provider in cloud technology has recently made announcements at Oracle CloudWorld in Las Vegas, promising to redefine enterprise IT. Among these innovations, Oracle Alloy stands out as a game-changing cloud infrastructure, offering unparalleled performance, scalability, and flexibility. Indian businesses can now leverage Alloy to seamlessly expand operations, ensure low-latency data access, and accelerate innovation. This development is set to enhance the competitiveness of Indian enterprises on the global stage.

In its latest update, Oracle is enhancing Alloy to emphasize its benefits for partners. With the upgrade, Alloy operators can oversee the complete customer lifecycle, tailor pricing, and service availability, and leverage OCI tools for monitoring and management.

To provide a comprehensive perspective on these developments and their impact on the Indian market, DQ Channels had an exclusive interview with Siddharth Idnani – Alliance & Channels, Oracle India.

What is the momentum in terms of acquiring new partners? and what is the procedure to sign in?

Oracle's partner program maintains strong momentum in APAC and India. New partners, regardless of prior engagement with Oracle, can swiftly join cloud tracks. Enrolment in the Oracle Partner Network (OPN) mandates an annual fee, ensuring quality standards. Tracks include licenses, hardware, and cloud services, with recent adjustments simplifying the signup process. Partners pay annual fees, aligning with the subscription-based cloud model. In India, over half of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure business is partner-driven, emphasizing their significant role. Overall, about 70% of APAC business is channel-driven, highlighting the program's effectiveness and expanding participation. This growing engagement underscores the program's success, with partners contributing significantly to Oracle's cloud business.

How does Oracle plan to provide support and training to the Indian enterprises, and make the most out of Alloy?

Alloy stands as a distinctive option setting us apart from other hyperscalers. Introduced about a year ago at OpenWorld, Alloy addresses the needs of large partners aspiring to become Cloud service providers while leveraging Oracle's comprehensive suite of services. Designed specifically for such partners, Alloy enables them to utilize Oracle's services, customize and white-label them, set pricing, and offer tailored solutions. This approach allows partners to cater to market segments they couldn't reach before or where Oracle lacked coverage. Alloy offers flexibility to end customers: those seeking Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) can directly approach Oracle, while those desiring customized services (OCI++) can engage with Alloy partners.

In terms of training and support, a system similar to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) is in place. Oracle University conducts certification and training programs for partners and customers. For Alloy, the focus shifts to training partners rather than end customers. Partners, with or without existing expertise in Oracle technologies, will receive training through Oracle University. This ensures partners are equipped to present these services effectively to their end customers, aligning with our commitment to enhancing both partner capabilities and customer experiences.

What are the different verticals that Oracle is focusing on? From an alloy perspective?

The idea is that, as I said, we have seen great momentum in BFSI, in government, and in general across all verticals, including mid-market. So with Alloy, like I said, the idea is that we are unable to tap otherwise. Alloy serves as a complementary platform, expanding customer options and allowing Oracle to broaden its reach. The beauty of Alloy lies in its versatility across all market segments. When a partner signs up for Alloy, they gain access to the complete suite of OCI services. Partners have the freedom to tailor their offerings based on their focus areas; for instance, they can target existing sectors like VFSI and government or venture into new territories like digital native customers.

Oracle's role is pivotal in setting up Alloy for the partner, ensuring the platform's proper deployment. While Oracle provides technical resources and level 3 support to partners, the partner is responsible for servicing their end customers. Oracle does not directly engage with end customers due to the unique arrangements with each partner. However, there is a comprehensive customer agreement between Oracle and the partner, specifying SLAs and Oracle's commitment to maintaining the platform's functionality, ensuring a seamless customer experience.

Cloud adoption is everywhere in every segment in India. So how Oracle is focusing and what is the role of partners?

So I think the reason we have embarked on this journey to sign up new partners and also continuously a global level revamp our partner program to make it more modular and to make it easier to bring in new partners is precisely because we believe that while Oracle has products and technologies, but to deliver a customer outcome, we need different kinds of partners that will either have domain expertise or they may have a horizontal solution expertise that will need to supplement Oracle's product or the OCI service. And that is the reason why we are so big and so invested in, one, adding new partners, and making sure we are constantly upskilling and helping get our existing partners a better experience.

How efficient they are, how happy they are, and how comfortable they are in terms of their understanding of Oracle technologies directly impacts how successful customer outcomes will be. And you may have heard this, you know, when Doug Smith was here, he talked about this. I think we've continued on that path. As I said before, because everything is subscription-based, partners must play a key role in helping drive consumption. While we have a strong direct presence, there are always, in many cases, but almost always in the future, there will be a partner who's doing something for the end customer to deliver, to translate that Oracle product or technology into a customer outcome.

what is your plan to you know to expand the availability of Oracle alloy in India?

Well, again like I said because it is very bespoke, we are talking to many of our partners or some of our partners and I cannot disclose the names for reasons of confidentiality, but the end objective again is how do we offer, how do we leverage the success we have had with OCI and expand it by putting it behind an alloy platform and allowing end customers greater choice.

So, we are in active discussions, but let us see how that goes. And the idea of course is that now that it is officially available, up until last year there was just an announcement made, but it was not available, but now it is available for sale in India. So, of course, as you would imagine, unlike an OCI service, this is a platform. The whole cycle of working with a partner to size it, to structure it, to build it out is potentially anywhere between six months to a year of engagement to get that going.

So that is where we are now. We've seen success in APAC and those are public references with Nomura. I think you NRI in Japan, you may have read about that. We could point you to a link there and maybe you could publish that as a success of what they've been able to achieve. And the idea is how we replicate this with one or two large Indian partners as well.

Have you touched upon what kind of partners, how Alloy makes sense for in India? I mean what kind of partners?

I think, potentially, it could be two kinds of partners. It could be a managed service provider. That could be one set of sort of partners which could be the large system integrators or services companies. The others potentially could be large Indian cloud providers that today have data centers that are offering public cloud services, but do not have the breadth of a hyperscaler or the features, functionality, security, and all of the aspects that come with being a large hyperscaler like Oracle is now.

We have 45 plus OCI regions and they're growing rapidly. And we built up and you've heard about this before that we build a differentiated cloud. It was not just tweaking or doing 10 percent more than what our competitors were doing. We built a different cloud with our Gen2 OCI offering. So that's why a large data center provider or a public cloud provider that believes that they can by adding the entire suite of OCI services to their portfolio, rebranding it, packaging it, will help them address a bigger market, they are probably a very good potential prospect for a lawyer.

I would say it is those two because this is a significant investment. It is not something that someone who does not have that scale or that presence will be able to justify an investment and the scale. Because you know it is not small. It takes a large investment to deploy, and it takes space to deploy, manage, market, and sell, so it is going to be the large names from within these two spaces.

How many partners have joined the Oracle Alloy platform?

Currently, we have just launched the Oracle Alloy platform, and the registration has just started, therefore we are in the process of adding channel partners for this platform. Overall, we have approximately 600 existing partners in the ecosystem, and we've notably added 25 to 30 new partners specifically for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). This move aligns with our strategy to encourage partners to focus on building services around OCI rather than simply being selling partners. To incentivize this shift, we've introduced a modular program that includes a self-track and solution expertise track (formerly service track).

Partners specializing in areas like HCM or ERP can now deepen their expertise and assist customers in migrating on-premises workloads to OCI. This focus allows partners to address specific customer needs, such as migrating Oracle Fusion ERP from on-premises to OCI, involving migration costs, services, and managed services. By encouraging partners to build expertise in specific areas and deepen their involvement in key workloads, they can drive continuous outcomes, creating opportunities for increased revenue with each new workload or project they undertake. Our revamped programs aim to support partners in achieving greater success by focusing on expertise and delivering tailored solutions to our customers.

-- By ANKIT PARASHAR and BHARTI TREHAN