Back in 2012, Mark Hurd spearheaded a corporate restructuring program to reduce the number of Oracle account contacts. In the past, customers had to deal with one sales rep for each of Oracle’s pillars: database, middleware, applications, engineered systems, and services. This was an inconvenience for customers who didn’t want to deal with that many reps from a single vendor. Mark’s program reduced this number from five down to one. Because of the enormous breadth of Oracle’s product portfolio, this single point of contact ended up being a jack of all trades, master of none.
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Hi - let me compound on the post I already made re: OPN modernization. Oracle has completely removed Java from the list of products available to resell. Many VARs including the one I work for spent a TON of resources and planning hours around selling Java. Time spent presenting to customers completely down the drain. There wasn't even an announcement about this, it was posted in the middleware knowledge zone, a place frequented by NOBODY. We had deals in flight that we couldn't see through because of this change.
I feel bad for the sales folks chasing SRs because the customer is p-ss-d and nothing is moving forward. Nobody cares though. You can have yours escalated with the hundreds of others.
To 1uxn+13derB4H's question. It's terrible. The OPN modernization has doubled or even tripled costs depending on which track(s) the partner wants to select. This is on top of new cert requirements to sell paas and iaas.
Newbie to O here. What is the climate among O partners and the partner programs? Any insights?
Got a random email from a rep asking for status on this that and the other. Going to need you to escalate SRs and provide me updates. (I worked in sales)
Take her name and do a search on LinkedIn.. she joined O from d—s Sporting Goods I couldn’t GTFO fast enough customers do the same thing. It’s bizarre that execs built an army of talent like that to effectively double down on ineptitude. There are VPs managing Senior Directors managing Senior Managers managing < 5 resources. Some of the managers have assistants. The company could be riffed by 60% layers and layers of redundancy moving legacy products and convoluted transactions with infighting over commissions. OCI is a half baked colo solution where customer experience involves interacting with the antiquated processes and tooling carried forward from the 90s. O will fade-away when the that fate becomes inevitable leadership will cash out.
No question the the trend for Oracle field sales is to replace higher paying ASM with graduates of Oracle University. There college new hires are trained extensively and are cheap. Pay a base of $70-80K per year and send them out selling. We will see more and more of this from big red over the next several quarters.
Im on the sales side and can say he must've thrown that plan out of the window when he introduced the ClassOf program. Customers still have many account managers, multiple field reps for each pillar along with respective OD reps, overlay reps, bdcs underneath each field rep and different solutions consultants aligning with each pillar. It's a total clusterf–k. Massive sales organization where about 99% of the salesforce have zero technical experience.
The one contact with experience does exist, certainly not millennials with a whopping 5 yrs (tops) Oracle experience and Zero industry experience. They all work for Keith at SF.com, Bill at SAP or Rod at Infor
Yeah, sounds about right. Now no one knows how to sell all those complex products that were bought over the last years.