In a major push to help its partners drive cloud adoption in Nigeria and across Africa, Oracle Partner Network (OPN) has hosted its Africa Partner Day in Nigeria. The event focused on presenting new resources and initiatives for partners to create innovative digital transformation strategies for organisations across the continent.
Speaking at the event, Director, Alliances and Channel, Oracle Africa, Stefan Diedericks, said: “Oracle Partner Day is the foundation to building a better future with our partners. Our aim is to drive united African growth that will result in shifts towards globally relevant intellectual property, arising from our continent while remaining locally relevant.”
During the Partner Day event in Nigeria, Oracle introduced new OPN enablement resources including the Cloud Excellence Implementer (CEI) programme. Diedericks said the programme aimed to help businesses make a smooth transition to the cloud through Oracle implementation partners.
According to Oracle, CEI programme is only available to partners with the skills and infrastructure to build, deploy, run and manage both Oracle and non-Oracle workloads.
“Our aim is to drive African intellectual property creation on top of the Oracle cloud platform. As Oracle’s cloud business continues to grow, Oracle partner network is expanding its ecosystem of highly qualified implementing firms to help drive customer success and experience with Oracle Cloud,” Diedericks said.
As a late entrant into the cloud market, Oracle has been doubling down on efforts to bolster its cloud-based services. Oracle’s total cloud business revenue rose to $1.47 billion in the three months ended August 31. In July, the company added 1 000 new jobs in Europe, Middle East and Africa, in order to grow its cloud computing business.
Also, the company plans to open cloud centres of excellence in Nigeria and Kenya – for now they are only available in Johannesburg, said Diedericks. “Cloud centres of excellence are physical environment where partners engage with Oracle cloud specialists and participate in workshop where they get help in developing innovative solutions,” he added
He continued:“Oracle is on a radical journey in driving global cloud adoption, inspiring partners to invest in economic and skills development by positioning and prioritising the creation of solutions built on the Oracle Cloud Platform.
“This gives businesses new innovative ways to engage with their citizens, customers, suppliers and consumers via artificial intelligence, cognitive learning, machine learning and blockchain technologies.”
According to the research manager IT services for IDC, Jon Tullet, cloud adoption in Africa is expected to evolve rapidly, just as it is worldwide, not just in sharp revenue growth, but in methodology, distributed services such as Internet of Things (IoT) and multicloud hybrids and channel mediation.
“The role of the channel must be emphasised in this; IDC forecasts that by 2020, more than 70 per cent of global cloud services providers’ revenues will be mediated by the channel,” he said.
“As a result, there is tremendous pressure on local channels to align themselves and their portfolios with their vendor partners as they come to emphasise cloud as a primary go to market strategy,” said Tullet. These changes within the channel and partner ecosystems in South Africa have been underway for a number of years, but at a slow pace,” he added.
He continued:“This will have to accelerate very quickly in the near term. We expect to see the channel move quickly to extend services around “complementary or value-add solutions for top-tier provider partners, workload migration and optimisation, hybrid infrastructure services, multicloud brokerage, and more.
“There will inevitably be a degree of business risk and some consolidation among providers; the partner support systems provided by the major vendors will be critical in supporting this evolution, including changes in incentivisation, support, training, and integration.”
Oracle has introduced a host of partner programmes in Africa including the Oracle Cloud Managed Service Provider (MSP) programme, which enables customers to speed up success in the cloud with support from the right partner and platform.
available to partners with the skills and infrastructure to build, deploy, run and manage both Oracle and non-Oracle workloads, enabling OPN members to offer a complete managed service solution for workloads running on Oracle Cloud.
