For Oracle, partners bring in the domain expertise needed in the region

“Partners bring in domain expertise and knowledge to help us reach out to customers that we can't reach out ourselves,” says Lalit Malik, group vice president, Alliances & Channels, Asia Pacific at Oracle.

While Oracle may not have the largest market share when it comes to cloud services in Southeast Asia, the vendor remains optimistic that it is capable of providing customers to get the most out of their tech investments, especially in developing and deploying GenAI use cases.

CRN Asia speaks to Lalit Malik, group vice president, Alliances & Channels, Asia Pacific, Oracle and Eng Koon Goh, vice president and general manager, Alliance and Channels, ASEAN, Oracle to understand more about how their enabling partners to provide the best service to customers and also expand their presence in the region.

How is Oracle helping businesses in their AI journey?

Malik: Oracle has the most comprehensive AI strategy as we've embedded AI into the three layers of our portfolio. We have applications such as SaaS, the platform, as well as infrastructure. So, we've got AI embedded in the complete stack.

If you start with the application layer, the SaaS layer, we've got 100 plus functionalities that are pre-built and existing today. They do not require any technical knowledge from the user and are offered as part of a current portfolio for free. For example, if you are a user and using ERP, you can do management reporting with insight and narratives. If you are an HCM user and if you've got candidates, you can do summarization of CVs, you can do job posting creations and you can answer questions of candidates within the organization. All these functionalities are pre-built within the application.

If you look at the platform layer, we are very different in our approach compared to the other hyperscalers. Our approach is to take AI to your data. We are not taking customers' data out. We're bringing in AI to customers' data. We've partnered with multiple LLM providers, where we train customers' own models and add GenAI capabilities to customers' data. It's a very fundamentally different approach than taking data out and then bringing it back to the customer.

And on the infrastructure layer, we've got a unique offering to our super cluster servers. We offer bare metal servers with the latest NVIDIA GPU chips. And our differentiation there is the networking technology that we use, RDMA or Remote Direct Memory Access, which is non-blocking high performance using local NVMe storage.

While having AI embedded in the stack is good, how is Oracle taking this to partners?

Malik: We are making sure that we provide enough capability to the partners in the areas of sales, pre-sales, and implementation. If you look at our partners, typically, they are business advisors, technology advisors and conduct technology transformation, business transformation for their customers.

So, we're working with them, enabling them through our learning methodologies that we have, and making sure that the partners go through the certifications. Our overall certifications have gone up 46% year on year. We also provide sandbox and support to partners to do testing, running proof of concepts.

More importantly, we work with these partners in creating use cases. In Asia, a lot of these organizations' customers are figuring out how to leverage and unlock the value with AI and these user use cases are very critical. We're working with partners with domain expertise and industry expertise to build those use cases and take it to their respective customers.

There are also three fundamental areas we look at when we work with partners. First, there is co-innovation. If you are an ISV, we want you to develop applications and innovate for the customers. If you're a system integrator, you build solutions for customers, innovate in that build and use AI functionality in that build. And if you are a reseller, you aggregate together and be part of that solution or deployment with the customer. So, we do solution innovation or co-innovate with the partner.

We also want to drive business impact and use that innovation to create differentiation for the customer. The power of that innovation is only delivered when you're using it in front of a customer to create that differentiation for that individual customer against their competitors.

To ensure customer success, we are working with partners, handholding them to ensure that the customer's journey is extremely positive. All the training and support that we provide is to drive that customer satisfaction. Our enhanced OEM program allows partners to come in at any stage, at any level.

We also offer business and technical support, which is more like POC funding support, integration validation, unlimited foundation training, digital assets, listing on oracle.com, and listing on marketplaces, joint press releases and. These are most of the benefits that we are offering to partners in these different levels of the partner program.

What are the biggest concerns from customers today when it comes to investing in technology?

Malik: I think the biggest concern is security and the second concern is how to deploy it in a cost-effective manner. There's a lot of surveys that have said that a lot of CIOs are saying that they're not getting a return on the investment they've made on cloud. And some of them are even looking at going back on-premises.

The answer should not be going back. Instead, the answer is look at products or services like Oracle. For security, it is all about deploying securely. For most of these organizations, their customer data is more than they would want it to. And then there's a lot of regulatory, solvency requirements that come into play. And Oracle has got a solution in the form of isolated cloud, sovereign cloud, LOA, DRCC, which are specific to a customer or a set of customers. We have those solutions, and hence the customers are talking to us.

How are partners helping customers understand their AI development and deployment journey?

Eng: Customers are at a different level of maturity when they look at AI. There are lots of customers who are wondering, what can AI do for them? And how can AI be real for them? So basically, you find that partners need to address some of the customers who are trying to learn and play and understand what AI can do. They may have to understand which model works for their context better.

And sometimes a single model may not work. It's a combination of different models. The Oracle Cloud allows different models to be put together in the same implementation for them to play and try the context that they work.

And once they are able to understand what AI can do for them when they deploy, security and data integrity becomes a concern. Having the right data and the right model to train for less hallucination becomes very important.

We’ve just launched an AI Center of Excellence in Singapore and one of the areas it focused on is for partners to learn with their customer what AI is all about. If they want to learn, they have to get certified and get trained. We have a partner called NTUC Learning Hub that can go with Oracle University to train them on AI. There's a play area where they can get a sandbox environment and can try and do different things with AI. They can try different models, and they can be guided by partners or be there on their own.

Once they're clear on what they want to do, they can go into the transformation area where they then work on a proof of concept, to crystallize an idea that they have in mind and bring it to fruition and adoption.

Lastly, what are you hoping to get from partners as well?

Eng: For us, the partners definitely have the business context of where AI is the most useful. Especially with GSIs, where they do business consulting, they know what customers' business needs are. Having a good platform with good CPUs, GPUs, and good network helps to do some of this AI in a very effective, cost-effective way. Together, partners provide business context to the AI that they can deploy on our platform.

Malik: When we work with our partners, we see they have domain expertise. When they are in banking, they're champions. They work with local banks, and they work with larger banks in the US, and they bring the same methodology, same transformational techniques to Asia as well.

I think that domain and industry expertise is what they bring in, and we strongly feel that partnering with them is a win-win because they have the industry. Our expertise is the product.

In the region, 80% of our SaaS implementations in Asia Pacific are actually done by partners. That's how partner-centric we are. We have had a partner-first strategy in Asia Pacific for the last five years. If you speak to any of our partners, you will see significant change that we've brought in in the last five years in terms of our engagement with them. They bring in expertise and the domain knowledge and help us reach out to customers that we can't reach out ourselves.