March 31, 2009
By

Herman Mehling

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Eager to pursue untapped opportunities in strategic technology areas – notably identity management, business intelligence and Enterprise 2.0 – Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL) has kicked off its North American ‘sales readiness initiative’ to help VARs drive new license and services business.

The initiative will verify the selling skills of 75 partners specializing in Oracle Database and Oracle Fusion Middleware, and give them the pre-sale, strategic training they need to excel, said Ted Bereswill, senior vice president, Oracle North America alliances and channels.

“The focus of the training is on getting partners up to speed on the business benefits of our pillar technologies so they can maximize their ability to sell solutions around security, Enterprise 2.0 and particularly Business Intelligence, which is a hot area,” he said.

“For the first time, we are giving our partners the same high level of training we give to our field salespeople,” said Bereswill. “There are plenty of sales opportunities that our field staff just cannot capitalize on due to limited resources. We believe this sales readiness initiative will improve the value proposition for partners who have invested to build their Oracle skills.”

Emphasizing business benefits, ROI

Oracle’s sales readiness initiative complements our existing consultative style of selling but it gives us more information and a sharper focus,” said John Ezzell, co-founder and executive vice president at BIAS Corp., Atlanta. “The Oracle training emphasizes the business benefits of the technologies – particularly the ROI dimension that seems to be the top priority for every CFO and CIO we meet with these days.”

The sales training is only for Oracle partners in North America with proven expertise in Oracle Fusion Middleware, Oracle Database and the Oracle Grid.

Bereswill said the initiative offers Oracle partners three key benefits. It will create a baseline measurement for expertise in selling Oracle Fusion Middleware, Oracle Database and Oracle Grid solutions; it will foster collaborative selling with the Oracle field sales operation, including joint business planning and lead passing from Oracle to partners; and it will promote partner expertise to existing and prospective Oracle customers.

Bereswill added that Oracle’s latest channel initiative continues the vendor’s commitment to sales and technical training and education for partners begun with its Enablement 2.0 strategy launched last year.

TAGS: Oracle, enterprise, business intelligence, VARs, identity management

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