Judson Althoff Blog

Oracle OpenWorld 2008 was an incredible experience and a great success. I enjoyed meeting hundreds of partners from around the world, and a heartfelt thank you to all the partners who attended, sponsored, exhibited, and presented sessions -– it would not have been possible without you.

If you attended, we hope you enjoyed the week, and left with valuable information and contacts. We’d like your feedback, so please take a moment to complete our survey here. It will help us plan next year.

If you were unable to join -– or want to revisit info or share with colleagues -– please click here for Oracle PartnerNetwork Online. We had a line-up of executives from across Oracle talking about partner enablement -– and all the sessions are available to you on demand. You can also download “partner only” presentations, and check out the Partner News Center with all partner-related announcements from Oracle and scores of partners.

Don’t miss Enablement 2.0, the new and improved partner enablement strategy we unveiled that will provide you with expanded education choices including new Boot Camps, Solution Kits, the OPN Competency Center, and an updated OPN portal. This is the first time we are taking training to the masses and providing flexible delivery options for our partners. With our new Boot Camps, we recognize that our partners have tremendous expertise to contribute, and we are open sourcing the content -– so that it will continually be evolved and refreshed with the most current and relevant materials related to our expanding product line. Our efforts in this area were picked up by Barb Darrow at TechTarget and Rick Whiting at CRN. Check it out!

Oracle OpenWorld 2008 by the Numbers

· More than 1500 partners at Oracle PartnerNetwork Forum, the “partner day” at Oracle OpenWorld -– up 110% from last year
· 6,200 partners visited the OPN Lounge
· 426 partner meetings / 2300 participants
· 14 partners awarded across 17 categories in North America 2008 Titan Awards
· 15 Global OPN Awards
· More than 65 partner-related news releases by Oracle and partners
· More than 70 sessions presented by partners –- a great way to get in front of customers

Mark your calendar for Oracle OpenWorld 2009, and if you’d like to learn about exhibiting click here.

· Latin America, March 10 - 12 · Tokyo, April 22 - 24 · San Francisco, October 11 - 15

Hey everybody. I just got back from traveling to Europe last week to speak at the OPN Day in Munich. There was a lot of talk about the global economy. Many questions were asked of me from partners regarding a strategy for maintaining margins and profitability during these difficult times. While this economy poses substantial challenges, I do believe that there is great opportunity for the Oracle partner ecosystem in these times. First and foremost, together, we represent solutions that bring tremendous value to customers across industries. Our portfolio of products, both organic and acquired, represents unique value which can be used to command margins and profitability for your business. In short, even if difficult times, smart customers invest for the future and do so by acquiring solutions that impact the most significant aspects of their business. To learn more about these solutions, I encourage you to take advantage of Enablement 2.0 and visit the Knowledge Zones on the new OPN Portal, as well as sign up for bootcamps to increase your skills across the Oracle portfolio. As always, please give us your feedback on this content so that we can continue to enhance what we provide to you. Keep your head up. The future is bright.

- Judson

Hey everybody. I just had the opportunity to review the preliminary results of our recent global OPN survey. Your feedback suggests that the most valuable thing that we can do for you is to provide you with up-to-date product information and related sales tools, while providing sales, pre-sales, and implementation training across our expanded portfolio of products. Interestingly enough, most of this data was collected prior to Oracle OpenWorld and our announcement of Enablement 2.0. The good news is that Enablement 2.0 is squarely focused on delivering all of these assets. The new Knowledge Zones are your "one-stop-shop" for solution kits for sales and marketing, discussion forums for collaboration with Oracle experts and other partners, as well as access to the OPN Competency Center guided learning paths to increase your skills. We also launched boot camps through our new 3-tier training strategy and have over a dozen available implementation training classes across our newly acquired products. All of these classes are provided at low or no cost to you. I also had the opportunity to share these thoughts with "The VAR Guy", and I would encourage you to see his blog at http://www.thevarguy.com/2008/10/07/oracle-takes-open-source-approach-to-partner-training/ as well as check out the pod cast that we recorded together. I encourage all of you to take advantage of Enablement 2.0 and get started by visiting the new OPN Portal. Good selling.

- Judson