For this week's TBT post, I'm continuing my Wizard of Oz series, which captured my thoughts on OpenWorld back in 2010.

We covered the Scarecrow in my blog titled "It looks like Agile Engineering Collaboration has a brain". Day three at Oracle Open World I was hoping to take advantage of the concentration of Oracle personnel and meet up with key Agile PLM team members to discuss how we can work together. Historically, Oracle's reputation as a partner-friendly company is not stellar. Oracle has always been known as a fairly hard driving organization that puts a lot of pressure on its sales organization to deliver results. This pressure can create situations with partners and customers that can be frustrating to say the least. Over the past couple of years, I have observed a maturing at Oracle and a subtle shift in the way that they interact with clients and partners. As their position as a market leader has solidified it seems like they are taking a longer-term view of the market and this has impacted their approach for the positive in my opinion. Compared to my last visit to Oracle OpenWorld, I found many more doors open to me and sales managers much more willing to discuss how we can work together. I don't think anything significantly has changed at Zero Wait-State so I attribute the openness to Oracle's interest in leveraging partners to further extend their reach. This blog will discuss the challenges of partnering with Oracle and what changes I have observed in how they engage with their clients and prospects. Make no mistake Oracle is not the big fuzzy teddy bear of enterprise software, more like Toto, nice for the most part but occasionally they might bite you for no reason.

As I mentioned above my intent for the day was to meet with many of the sales team that works with Agile PLM as I could. I also set up some time to meet with other Oracle partners since we do a lot of collaboration given our tight focus on PLM and engineering collaboration. Unlike previous meetings the Oracle team seem more open to working with partners. One Vice President I met with even acknowledged that historically both Agile prior to acquisition and Oracle in the past have been somewhat averse to working with partners. Oracle has made organizational changes that almost compel them to more actively engage partners particularly with accounts under 100 million in revenue. Oracle has also been stepping up partner enablement for their application suite. As they transfer more of the responsibility of small and medium business to the partners it is critical that they have competent partners to deliver solutions to this market. Given the breadth of Oracle's offerings it can be quite challenging to successfully master all aspects of these technologies. This is one of the reasons we chose to tighten our focus on PLM and specialize in engineering collaboration. Other larger partners attempt to offer a broader solution set that encompasses the complete business and product development process. This includes customer relationship management on the front end, PLM in the middle and enterprise resource planning on the end. In the middle of all this you have business analytics, product portfolio management, regulatory compliance and a plethora of other solutions that help companies develop and deliver products. I am very excited about the fact that I got to use the word plethora today. What all this acquisition and breadth is doing is to create a culture where Oracle is more dependent on partners and partners are more dependent on each other to deliver value to the customer. Just like I mentioned in my blog on silos about not having all your eggs in one basket I think it is healthy to have partners working in tandem with Oracle to ensure client value. The closer a vendor is to the problem the more effective they can be but many times the problem they are experiencing is part of a larger issue so to be truly effective the solutions provider needs focus and breadth. Typically, this is difficult to pull off but using a combination of partners allows this to work for Oracle.

As an example of this phenomenon I can reference a couple of interactions we have had with Oracle recently. Our focus on CAD data management has pulled us into many larger organizations that are wrestling with PDM tools and legacy systems and how to move forward. One discussion we recently had with a client led to discussions around their larger issues trying to modernize and consolidate their business structures that go well beyond CAD tools and data management solutions. Because of Oracle's approach we can engage them in the dialogue with the client and remain involved as a trusted advisor to the client and to deliver the solutions appropriate to our capabilities. This experience is somewhat unique for us based on interactions with other vendors. Some of these vendors tend to take a different approach with partners in that it's kind of an “either/or" scenario. If the client is of a certain size, they are a partner's and if they are larger they are direct. While this may be cleaner to manage, it is not reflective of the real world. Large companies have smaller divisions and even in larger companies partners can be more effective in delivering certain types of solutions. The hybrid approach Oracle uses seems to be more pragmatic and serve the market better. Another situation that illustrates Oracle's willingness to work with partners involves a very large Fortune 100 company that acquired a company we were working with. Even though the Fortune 100 customer insisted on working directly with Oracle they still sub contracted the work to us since we made them aware of the opportunity. This is not typical behavior for most vendors and shows a significant commitment to working with partners.

One last thought about Oracle and their new-found largesse revolves around customer perception. The client we met with last night used a saying that I found amusing. He stated that people in his $600 million-dollar company who actually own EBS view Oracle as "using the Queen Mary to go fishing". He questioned the wisdom of this assessment given the companies aspirations to grow larger. There is a lingering perception about Oracle and their suitability to address smaller companies’ needs. They have struggled to fight this perception by trying to use business accelerators to shorten implementation times and lower cost of adoption. Ultimately niche partners will help address this issue by being able to leverage Oracle offerings to provide specific solutions to issues in a timelier manner and move away from the massive IT projects Oracle has been known for in the past. The other trend I am observing is that Oracle seems more willing to invest up front with clients to better define business needs. Their assessment methodologies are becoming more ingrained in their engagement model and they seem more than willing to use this approach up front to identify the right solution. I think this comes from increased confidence on their part about their solutions. The biggest issue they must overcome is convincing the customer that the assessment is legitimate and not some puffed up dog and pony show to try and justify a purchase.

Overall it does seem Oracle is starting to emerge as a mature and thoughtful enterprise software company. Their acquisition strategy seems to move them into a more relevant position for companies trying to address their business and product development strategies. Oracle still has a lot of work to do to fight lingering perceptions about their business methodologies and some partners still are frustrated navigating Oracle's formidable bureaucracy but it does seem that Oracle recognizes to continue to expand their vast empire that they will need to work cooperatively with partners and customers to achieve their objectives. We will see if this trend continues.