PARTNER FOCUS
Oracle ExadataMarketing Campaign
Steve McNickleVP Europe, cVidya
Steve McNickle is VP Europe for cVidya, an innovative provider of revenue intelligence solutions for telecom, media and entertainment service providers including AT&T, BT, Deutsche Telecom and Vodafone. The company's product portfolio helps operators and service providers maximise margins, improve customer experience and optimise ecosystem relationships through revenue assurance, fraud and security management, sales performance management, pricing analytics, and inter-carrier services. cVidya has partnered with Oracle for more than a decade.
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Please could you tell us a little about cVidya's partnering history with Oracle, and expand on your Oracle Exastack accreditations?
"cVidya was established just over ten years ago and we've had a strong relationship with Oracle almost since the very beginning. Through our Revenue Intelligence work with some of the world's largest service providers we collect tremendous amounts of information, amounting
to billions of records per day. We help our clients
to collect, store and analyse that data
to ensure that their end customers are getting the best levels of service, are billed correctly, and are happy that they are on the correct price plan. We have been an Oracle Gold level partner for seven years, and crucially just two months ago we were also accredited as Oracle Exastack Optimized for MoneyMap, our core Revenue Assurance solution. Very soon we also expect
to be Oracle Exastack Optimized DRMap, our Data Retention solution."
What unique capabilities and customer benefits does Oracle Exastack add
to your applications?
"Oracle Exastack enables us
to deliver radical benefits
to our customers. A typical mobile operator in the UK might handle between 500 million and two billion call data record details daily. Each transaction needs
to be validated, billed correctly and fraud checked. Because of the enormous volumes involved, our clients demand scalable infrastructure that allows them
to efficiently acquire, store and process all that data within controlled cost, space and environmental constraints. We have proved that the Oracle Exadata system can process data up
to seven times faster and load it as much as 20 times faster than other standard best-of-breed server approaches. With the Oracle Exadata Database Machine they can reduce their datacentre equipment from say, the six or seven cabinets that they needed in the past, down
to just one. This dramatic simplification delivers incredible value
to the customer by cutting down enormously on all of their significant cost, space, energy, cooling and maintenance overheads."
"The Oracle Exastack Program has given our clients the ability
to switch their focus from reactive
to proactive. Traditionally they may have spent 80 percent of their day processing, and just 20 percent enabling end customers
to see advanced analytics, and avoiding issues before they occur. With our solutions and Oracle Exadata they can now switch that balance around entirely, resulting not only in reduced revenue leakage, but a far higher focus on proactive leakage prevention.
How has the Oracle Exastack Program transformed your customer business?
"We can already see the impact. Oracle solutions allow our delivery teams
to achieve successful deployments, happy customers and self-satisfaction, and the power of Oracle's Exa solutions is easy
to measure in terms of their transformational ability. We gained our first sale into a major European telco by demonstrating the major performance gains that would transform their business. Clients can measure the ease of organisational change, the early prevention of business issues, the reduction in manpower required
to provide protection and coverage across all their products and services, plus of course end customer satisfaction. If customers know that that service is provided accurately and that their bills are calculated correctly, then over time this satisfaction can be attributed
to revenue intelligence and the underlying systems which provide it. Combine this with the further integration we have with the other layers of the Oracle stack, including the telecommunications offerings such as NCC, OCDM and BRM, and the result is even greater customer value—not
to mention the increased speed
to market and the reduced project risk."
What does the Oracle Exastack community bring
to cVidya, both in terms of general benefits, and also tangible new opportunities and partnerships?
"A great deal. We have participated in the Oracle Exastack community heavily over the past year, and have had lots of meetings with Oracle and our peers around the globe. It brings us into contact with like-minded, innovative partners, who like us are not happy
to just stand still and want
to take fresh technology
to their customer base in order
to gain enhanced value. We identified three new partnerships in each of two recent meetings, and hope these will open up new opportunities, not only in areas that exactly match where we operate today, but also in some new associative areas that will expand our reach into new business sectors. Notably, thanks
to the Exastack community we were invited on stage at last year's Oracle OpenWorld conference. Appearing so publically with Oracle senior VP Judson Althoff elevated awareness and visibility of cVidya and has enabled us
to participate in a number of other events with Oracle over the past eight months. We've been involved in speaking opportunities, forums and exhibitions, providing us with invaluable opportunities that we wouldn't otherwise have got close
to."
How has Exastack differentiated cVidya as an ISV, and helped you
to evolve your business
to the next level?
"When we are selling
to our core customer base of Tier 1 telecommunications providers, we know that they want more than just software. They want an enduring partnership that will last many years, they want innovation, and a forward thinking partner who knows how
to guide them on where they need
to be
to meet market demand three, five or seven years down the line. Membership of respected global bodies, such as the Telemanagement Forum enables us
to lead standard adherence in our area of business, giving us a lot of credibility, but Oracle is also involved in this forum with its own telecommunications portfolio, strengthening our position still further. When we approach CEOs, CTOs and CIOs at the very largest Tier 1 operators, not only can we easily show them that our technology is fantastic, we can also talk about our strong partnership with Oracle, and our joint embracing of today's standards and tomorrow's innovation."
Where would you like cVidya
to be in one year's time?
"We want
to get all of our relevant products Oracle Exastack Optimized. Our MoneyMap Revenue Assurance solution is already Exastack Optimised, our DRMAP Data Retention Solution should be Exastack Optimised within the next month, and our FraudView Fraud Management solution within the next two
to three months. We'd then like
to extend our Oracle accreditation out
to include other members of the Oracle Engineered Systems family. We are moving into the 'Big Data' space, and so we're obviously very keen
to work closely with Oracle
to conduct pilots, map new technologies onto Oracle Big Data platforms, and embrace and measure the benefits of other Oracle systems, namely Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud, the Oracle Exalytics In-Memory Machine and the Oracle SPARC SuperCluster. We would also like
to examine how the Oracle Database Appliance might benefit our Tier 2 service provider customers. Finally, we'd also like
to continue working with the Oracle Communications Global Business Unit (CGBU), furthering our integration with Oracle billing products so that we are able
to quickly deploy fraud solutions into Oracle's Engineered System stack, give operational benefits
to our clients that are pre-integrated, more cost-effective, and can be rapidly deployed rapidly and producing benefits in three months, not nine months."
Chris Baker ,Senior Vice President, Oracle Worldwide ISV-OEM-Java Sales
Chris Baker is the Global Head of ISV/OEM Sales responsible for working with ISV/OEM partners
to maximise Oracle's business through those partners, whilst maximising those partners' business
to their end users. Chris works with partners, customers, innovators, investors and employees
to develop innovative business solutions using Oracle products, services and skills.
Firstly, could you please explain Oracle's current strategy for ISV partners, globally and in EMEA?
"Oracle customers use independent software vendor (ISV) applications
to run their businesses. They use them
to generate revenue and
to fulfil obligations
to their own customers. Our strategy is very straight-forward. We want all of our ISV partners and OEMs
to concentrate on the things that they do the best – building applications
to meet the unique industry and functional requirements of their customer. We want
to ensure that we deliver a best in class application platform so the ISV is free
to concentrate their effort on their application functionality and user experience We invest over four billion dollars in research and development every year, and we want our ISVs
to benefit from all of that investment in operating systems, virtualisation, databases, middleware, engineered systems, and other hardware. By doing this, we help them
to reduce their costs, gain more consistency and agility for quicker implementations, and also rapidly differentiate themselves from other application vendors. It's all about simplification because we believe that around 25
to 30 percent of the development costs incurred by many ISVs are caused by customising infrastructure and have nothing
to do with their applications. Our strategy is
to enable our ISV partners
to standardise their application platform using engineered architecture, so they can write once
to the Oracle stack and deploy seamlessly in the cloud, on-premise, or in hybrid deployments. It's really important that architecture is the same in order
to keep cost and time overheads at a minimum, so we provide standardisation and an environment that enables our ISVs
to concentrate on the core business that makes them the most money and brings them success."
How do you believe this strategy is helping the ISVs
to work hand-in-hand with Oracle
to ensure that end customers get the industry-leading solutions that they need?
"We work with our ISVs not just
to help them be successful, but also
to help them market themselves. We have something called the 'Oracle Exastack Ready Program', which enables ISVs
to publicise themselves as 'Ready'
to run the core software platforms that run on Oracle's engineered systems including Exadata and Exalogic. So, for example, they can become 'Database Ready' which means that they use the latest version of Oracle Database and therefore can run their application without modification on Exadata or the Oracle Database Appliance. Alternatively, they can become WebLogic Ready, Oracle Linux Ready and Oracle Solaris Ready which means they run on the latest release and therefore can run their application, with no new porting work, on Oracle Exalogic. Those 'Ready' logos are important in helping ISVs advertise
to their customers that they are using the latest technologies which have been fully tested. We now also have Exadata Ready and Exalogic Ready programmes which allow ISVs
to promote the certification of their applications on these platforms. This highlights these partners
to Oracle customers as having solutions that run fluently on the Oracle Exadata Database Machine, the Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud or one of our other engineered systems. This makes it easy for customers
to identify solutions and provides ISVs with an avenue
to connect with Oracle customers who are rapidly adopting engineered systems. We have also taken this programme
to the next level in the shape of 'Oracle Exastack Optimized' for partners whose applications run best on the Oracle stack and have invested the time
to fully optimise application performance. We ensure that Exastack Optimized partner status is promoted and supported by press releases, and we help our ISVs go
to market and differentiate themselves through the use our technology and the standardisation it delivers.
To date we have had several hundred organisations successfully work through our Exastack Optimized programme."
How does Oracle's strategy of offering pre-integrated open platform software and hardware allow ISVs
to bring their products
to market more quickly?
"One of the problems for many ISVs is that they have
to think very carefully about the technology on which their solutions will be deployed, particularly in the cloud or hosted environments. They have
to think hard about how they secure these environments, whether the concern is, for example, middleware, identity management, or securing personal data. If they don't use the technology that we build-in
to our products
to help them
to fulfil these roles, they then have
to build it themselves. This takes time, requires testing, and must be maintained. By taking advantage of our technology, partners will now know that they have a standard platform. They will know that they can confidently talk about implementation being the same every time they do it. Very large ISV applications could once take a year or two
to be implemented at an on-premise environment. But it wasn't just the configuration of the application that took the time, it was actually the infrastructure - the different hardware configurations, operating systems and configurations of databases and middleware. Now we strongly believe that it's all about standardisation and repeatability. It's about making sure that our partners can do it once and are then able
to roll it out many different times using standard componentry."
What actions would you recommend for existing ISV partners that are looking
to do more business with Oracle and its customer base, not only
to maximise benefits, but also
to maximise partner relationships?
"My team, around the world and in the EMEA region, is available and ready
to talk
to any of our ISVs and
to explore the possibilities together. We run programmes like 'Excite' and 'Insight'
to help us
to understand how we can help ISVs with architecture and widen their environments. But we also want
to work with, and look at, new opportunities - for example, the Machine-to-Machine (M2M) market or 'The Internet of Things'. Over the next few years, many millions, indeed billions of devices will be collecting massive amounts of data and communicating it
back to the central systems where ISVs will be running their applications. The only way that our partners will be able
to provide a single vendor 'end-to-end' solution is
to use Oracle integrated systems at the
back end and Java on the 'smart' devices collecting the data – a complete solution from device
to data centre. So there are huge opportunities
to work closely with our ISVs, using Oracle's complete M2M platform,
to provide the infrastructure that enables them
to extract maximum value from the data collected. If any partners don't know where
to start or who
to contact, then they can contact me directly at
[email protected] or indeed any of our teams across the EMEA region. We want
to work with ISVs
to help them
to be as successful as they possibly can through simplification and speed
to market, and we also want all of the top ISVs in the world based on Oracle."
What opportunities are immediately opened
to new ISV partners joining the OPN?
"As you know OPN is very, very important. New members will discover a huge amount of content that instantly becomes accessible
to them. They can access a wealth of no-cost training and enablement materials
to build their expertise in Oracle technology. They can download Oracle software and use it for development projects. They can help themselves become more competent by becoming part of a true community and uncovering new opportunities by working with Oracle and their peers in the Oracle Partner Network. As well as publishing massive amounts of information on OPN, we also hold our global Oracle OpenWorld event, at which partners play a huge role. This takes place at the end of September and the beginning of October in San Francisco. Attending ISV partners have an unrivalled opportunity
to contribute
to elements such as the OpenWorld / OPN Exchange, at which they can talk
to other partners and really begin thinking about how they can move their businesses on and play key roles in a very large ecosystem which revolves around technology and standardisation."
Finally, are there any other messages that you would like
to share with the Oracle ISV community?
"The crucial message that I always like
to reinforce is architecture, architecture and architecture! The key opportunities that ISVs have today revolve around standardising their architectures so that they can confidently think: “I will I be able
to do exactly the same thing whenever a customer is looking
to deploy on-premise, hosted or in the cloud”. The right architecture is critical
to being competitive and
to really start changing the game. We want
to help our ISV partners
to do just that;
to establish standard architecture and
to seize the opportunities it opens up for them. New market opportunities like M2M are enormous - just look at how many devices are all around you right now. We can help our partners
to interface with these devices more effectively while thinking about their entire ecosystem, rather than just the piece that they have traditionally focused upon. With standardised architecture, we can help people dramatically improve their speed, reach, agility and delivery of enhanced customer satisfaction and value all the way from the Java side
to their centralised systems. All Oracle ISV partners must take advantage of these opportunities, which is why Oracle will continue
to invest in and support them."
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Gergely Strbik is Oracle Hardware and Software Product Manager for Avnet in Hungary. Avnet Technology Solutions is an OracleValue Added Distributor focused on the development of the existing Oracle channel. This includes the recruitment and enablement of Oracle partners as well as driving deeper adoption of Oracle's technology and application products within the IT channel.
"The main business benefits of ODA for our customers and partners are scalability, flexibility, a great price point for the high performance delivered, and the easily configurable embedded Linux operating system. People welcome a lower point of entry and the ability
to grow capacity on demand as their business expands."
"Marketing and selling the ODA requires another way of thinking because it is an appliance. We have
to transform the ways in which our partners and customers think from buying hardware and software independently
to buying complete solutions. Successful early adopters and satisfied customer reactions will certainly help us
to sell the ODA. We will have more experience with the product after the first deliveries and installations—end users need
to see the power and benefits for themselves."
"Our typical ODA customers will be those looking for complete solutions from a single reseller partner who is also able
to manage the appliance. They will have enjoyed using Oracle Database but now want a new product that is able
to unlock new levels of performance. A higher proportion of potential customers will come from our existing Oracle base, with around 30% from new business, but we intend
to evangelise the ODA on the market
to see how we can change this balance as all our customers adjust
to the concept of 'Hardware and Software, Engineered
to Work Together'.
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