#8767 oracle delegate brochure kenya'13

PARTNERING FOR AFRICA

ORACLEPARTNEREXECUTIVE FORUM

HOTEL WINDSOR, NAIROBI , KENYASEPTEMBER 4th-5th , 2013

Dear Delegate,

I have the honour and pleasure of welcoming you to Kenya for the Oracle Partner Executive Forum Partnering for Africa. It is the third time we are hosting this exclusive event for key partners such as yourselves, bringing together the expertise of business leaders from across the continent.

The leading theme in our discussion in Nairobi over the next two days is the impact of the Cloud and Software as a Service across the African markets. In an era of rising competition, rapid technological advancement and widespread market volatility, the Cloud and SaaS paradigm is a groundbreaking next step to gain competitive advantage.

You will find the Forum’s agenda very interactive, providing plenty of opportunities to exchange views, ask questions and gain valuable insights through a combination of keynotes, case studies, workshops and roundtables. Additional extra-curriculum activities will allow you to explore further in individual conversations, as well as engage with other executives and experts from Oracle.

To aid our discussions, this brochure provides you with extensive background reading, including a paper on the Cloud in Africa, based on dedicated research undertaken with partners and other experts exclusively for Partnering for Africa. It also contains all you need to know about the Forum, including the agenda, speakers and supporting material for the sessions.

Please do take advantage of the presence of top Oracle Sales Executives at the event to discuss future business opportunities – we are here to do business with you. Many of our discussions with you last year in Addis Ababa resulted in large deals that we won jointly.

I hope you enjoy your visit to Kenya and I look forward to discussing with you how to unleash the many exciting business opportunities that are emerging across Africa.

Best wishes,

Janusz NaklickiVice President Alliance and Channels and General Business SalesOracle ECEMEA

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Copyright © 2013 by Oracle 3


Table of Contents

Agenda 7

Background Papers 11

Up in the cloud: the next African technology leapfrog? 12

Mobility and the cloud: Africa’s true mobile revolution has yet to start 25

Briefing Papers by Oracle 29

How can partners make money and enhance their relationship with

customers through SaaS and PaaS? 30

How to save money on implementation using Oracle Rapid Start: examples of

successful projects 34

Teaming up with Oracle to win BIG deals in data centre and integration solutions 39

Oracle Support Demystified: engineered to support customers together 41

Oracle, Partners and Customers: engineered to work ethically together 44

Speakers’ biographies 47

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Copyright © 2013 by Oracle

AgendaT I M E T I T L E

Tuesday, 3rd September 2013

16:00 Early Registration

20:00 Welcome Cocktails

Wednesday, 4th September 2013

08:30 Registration and Sign-up for One-to-ones

09:00 Welcoming Remarks and Introduction to the Forum Janusz Naklicki, Vice President Alliance and Channels and General Business Sales, Oracle ECEMEA Gilbert Saggia, Country Manager, Oracle Kenya

09:10 KEYNOTE The Cloud Revolution: What it Means for Business in Africa The technology leapfrog in Africa is largely a consumer phenomenon. Could the cloud be the trigger that allows enterprises to jump forward – and if so, how might African Companies take advantage of it? Bright Simons, President, mPedigree Network. Followed by Q&A Moderator: Delia Meth-Cohn, Managing Director, Global Rethink

10:00 PANEL Using Software as a Service: Success Stories and Lessons from Oracle and Partners A lack of legacy systems, the pricing model and flexibility make SaaS perfect for businesses in Africa. And yet take-up is slow. Why do companies decide to use cloud-based business software? What are the advantages and challenges for partners in selling the cloud? Prabu Balasubramanyan, Executive Director, TransSys Pierre Lamboray, Co-Founder and Managing Director Africa, Popay Sankar Naraynan, Executive Director, InLaks Swaminathan Natarajan, Senior Director, Fusion Applications Business Development, Oracle ECEMEA Customer case study Moderator: Janusz Naklicki, Vice President Alliance and Channels and General Business Sales, Oracle ECEMEA

11:15 Break

12:00 Regional Business Strategy for Africa, Review of FY13 and Priorities for FY14 Gurhan Kalelioglu, Vice President, Technology Sales, Oracle East & West Africa, Turkey, Central Asia Arun Khehar, Vice President Application Sales, Oracle Middle East & Africa

Cherian Varghese, Senior Sales Director, Oracle Transition Countries

13:00 Lunch

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14:15 INTERACTIVE WORKSHOPS Discussion in smaller groups, focused on opportunities, challenges and possible solutions

The Market for Pay-as-you Go Software: The Right Offering in Africa? • Istheresufficientfixedandmobileinfrastructureinplacetosupportclouddevelopment? • Whichcustomersrespondbesttocloudmodels–isitrightforpublicsectorandbigplayersormorefor SMEs? Who responds best: CIOs, CFOs, business heads, other functions? • Whatisthemainattractionfortheclient:accessibility,productivityandotherbusinessadvantagesor affordability, shifting from capex to opex, simplifying IT management? • Howtodealwithconcernsabouttrust,regulatoryconstraintsforpublicsectorcustomers. • WhatarethemainchallengesinimplementingandrunningSaaSsolutions? • FindingaworkablebusinessmodelforsellingSaaSsolutions • WheredoesBigDatafitintothecloudpicture? • CouldSaaSprovideanothertechnologyleapforAfrica,asmobilesdid?

15:45 The Oracle Partner Ecosystem: The Launch of a New Era! Introducing the Partner Ecosystem portal, based on your feedback from previous Partnering for Africa forums and designed to facilitate interaction, leverage skill-sets and competencies and encourage synergies across Africa. Lynne Gillon, Senior Director, Partner Business Development, Oracle ECEMEA

16:05 SUMMARY What We’ve Learnt So Far Delia Meth-Cohn, Managing Director, Global Rethink

16:15 NETWORKING Around the Golf Course – Putting and Petanque (bowls) Competition – One-to-one Meetings Between Partners and with Oracle

19:30 Cocktails and Gala Dinner

Thursday, 5th September 2013

09:00 Oracle and Partners – Engineered to Work Together Janusz Naklicki, Vice President Alliance and Channels and General Business Sales, Oracle ECEMEA Oracle, Partners and Customers – Engineered to Work Ethically Together Julia Windemuth, Senior Director, Legal and Regional Compliance and Ethics Officer, Oracle EMEA Oracle and Partners – Engineered to Make Money Together Nagy Al Saeed, Director, Alliance & Channels, Oracle MEA

Oracle and Partners – Engineered to Support Customers Together Rafal Dabrowski, Regional Partner Management Director, Oracle Support ECEMEA

Copyright © 2013 by Oracle8

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10:00 ORACLE ROUNDTABLES Each roundtable will last 40-45 minutes and be repeated three times. Coffee will be available during the roundtables

Roundtable 1: How can Partners make Money and Enhance their Relationship with Customers through SaaS and PaaS? Discussion leaders: Sanjay Sinha, Vice President, Platform Products, Oracle WW Liam Nolan, Senior Director, Product Development and Product Management SaaS, Oracle WW Moderator: Lynne Gillon, Senior Director, Partner Business Development, Oracle ECEMEA

Roundtable 2: How to Save Money on Implementation using Oracle Rapid Start? Examples of Successful Projects Discussion leader: Sarkis Kerkezian, CEP Transformation Programs Manager, Oracle MEA Moderator: Mohammed Owais, Senior Director, Application Partners, Oracle ECEMEA

Roundtable 3: Teaming up with Oracle to Win BIG Deals in Data Centre & Integration Solutions Discussion leaders: Gilbert Saggia, Country Manager, Oracle Kenya Sedat Zencirci, Sales Consulting Director, Oracle Central Asia and Turkey Moderator: Gurhan Kalelioglu, Vice President, Technology Sales, Oracle East & West Africa, Turkey, Central Asia

12:45 Follow-up from Last Year and Action Points Moving Forward Forum 2012 action points recap Lynne Gillon, Senior Director, Partner Business Development, Oracle ECEMEA Summary and conclusions from SaaS Partner Advisory Board & Africa Partner Advisory Board Meera Kaul, Manging Director, Moment and Chair of Oracle SaaS Partner Advisory Board Tunde Badejo, CEO, Soft Alliance and Chair of Oracle Africa Partner Advisory Board Takeaways and action points from the Forum 2013 Janusz Naklicki, Vice President Alliance and Channels and General Business Sales, ECEMEA Gurhan Kalelioglu, Vice President, Technology Sales, Oracle East & West Africa, Turkey, Central Asia Arun Khehar, Vice President Application Sales, Oracle Middle East & Africa Moderator: Delia Meth-Cohn, Managing Director, Global Rethink

13:15 Lunch 14:30 Individual Meetings Between Partners and with Oracle

17:00 Close


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Background Papers:

•Up in the cloud: the next African technology leapfrog? Delia Meth-Cohn, Managing Director, Global Rethink

•Mobility and the cloud: Africa’s true mobile revolution has yet to start Bright Simons, President, mPedigree Network


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Up in the cloud: the next African technology leapfrog?By Delia Meth-Cohn

The cloud could have been invented for Africa. The pay-as-you-go SaaS model (Software as a Service - see box for definitions) gets around financing constraints, while its scalability and variable service levels accommodate fast-growing businesses and help handle volatile environments. In addition, the lack of legacy systems makes the decision to opt for cloud solutions far easier than in the West where companies have invested millions into buying servers and software.

As a result, the cloud could allow African companies to leapfrog the painful process of installing servers and implementing software solutions. If that happened, it would transform enterprise technology over the next decade in the same way that mobiles revolutionised consumer technology in the past one. But the constraints in Africa remain large, ranging from the quality and cost of broadband connections to a lack of trust in what remains a relatively unknown service offering.

The reality is that the cloud, for all its massive potential, is still virtually non-existent across the continent. In the SaaS space, sizeable deals are few and far between – a few banks, telcos and the odd pioneer in other sectors – mostly still in the implementation or pipeline stage. Although growing, adoption is remarkably slow. This background paper will look at whether the cloud will become a big business opportunity for technology companies across Africa and catapult the continent forward. It will:

• focusinonthedriversandconstraintsofcloudtechnologycomparedtoelsewhereintheworld • lookatthemarketsandproductswherepick-upwillbefastest,and • explorehowtechnologycompanieswillneedtoapproachsellingthecloudtoboosttheirbusiness, rather than merely hollow out their margins.

The paper concludes that the cloud will transform enterprise technology use in Africa over time, although growth is likely to be uneven and require a good few years to reach critical mass. For companies that want to sell the SaaS model and other cloud services, however, the work in building awareness, developing new skills and creating a feasible business model starts now. Ignoring cloud solutions as too difficult and unprofitable in the short term is a recipe for long-term decline.

We will discuss these findings as well as your thoughts and experiences during the workshop at Oracle Africa Partners Forum in Nairobi.

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Getting to critical mass: the drivers and constraints of the SaaS model

For all the hype around the cloud globally, it is just starting to reach critical mass in the US, and Europe is trailing one to two years behind. The biggest take-up has been among small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). According to a new report by Spiceworks1, 61% of SMEs in the US and Europe are using cloud-based applications today and a further 5% intend to start using them in the next six months, bringing the total to 66% (see chart). While this includes cloud-based web and email hosting, 46% of SMEs already have productivity solutions, 24% sales support and 19% business support, with growth in these categories over the next six months well above the average.

Definitions in the cloudCloud computing is the art of using processing power elsewhere to meet your requirements. There

are three delivery models, each of which can be deployed on a public, private or community cloud.

SaaS: Software as a Service is designed for end-users, who pay a subscription fee to a subscriber

and receive access to a business application via the internet. The provider takes responsibility for the

provision of the software, hosting, backups, hardware support, technical upgrades and so on. The

only requirement for the subscriber is internet access and a web browser.

PaaS: Platform as a Service entails the provision of technology services such as database,

middleware, identity management, developer services, messaging and storage. This enables a

customer to build applications using this infrastructure.

IaaS: Infrastructure as a Service is designed for IT departments that want to maintain their own

software environment entirely, but do not want to buy and maintain the hardware needed to

support it. Its servers are therefore virtual and paid for on a leasing basis.

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1 State of SMB IT 1H 2013 http://www.spiceworks.com/marketing/state-of-smb-it/

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SME’s use of cloud applications in North America and Europe

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2 The Future of Cloud Computing. 3rd Annual Survey 2013, North Bridge and Gigaom

http://www.northbridge.com/2013-cloud-computing-survey

Another recent survey from North Bridge2, focusing just on the US, shows 63% of respondents using SaaS solutions in their company, with significant growth still to come (see chart).

1 State of SMB IT 1H 2013 http://www.spiceworks.com/marketing/state-of-smb-it/

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Cloud use by type of application, US market 2013

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3 Cloud Channel Trends, 2013 to 2014, February 2013

http://www.forrester.com/pimages/rws/reprints/document/90001/oid/1-LMIK8X

Source: http://www.northbridge.com/2013-cloud-computing-survey

Translated into revenue terms, Forrester forecasts that channel partners (across all vendors) in the US and Europe will increase their reliance on SaaS and other cloud-based services from a current average of 22% of their revenue to 27% in 20143. The focus is now clearly shifting from getting cloud infrastructurein place and experimenting with pilot projects to applications.

In comparison, Africa is right at the beginning. “South Africa, the most advanced cloud market in the region, is about two years behind Europe, and one or two years ahead of the rest of Africa,” according to Margaret Adam, Program Director - Services for the region at IDC. “But we are seeing some innovation in countries like Kenya, Rwanda, Ghana and Senegal, and these have the potential to catch up quickly.” Indeed Albie Bester, Managing Director of Pamoja, a provider of wholesale data hosting and cloud platforms, says Kenya is growing in leaps and bounds and might be leading in Africa next year.

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“Cloud does have huge potential – and there could be a leapfrog effect as companies embrace new models and move directly on to the new technology,” says Frank Rizzo, Technology Partner at KPMG South Africa. “But the take-up is very slow. The cloud should be exploding and we need to unpack why that is not the case.” There are three sets of constraints slowing the adoption of SaaS solution – and they vary in importance across the continent. The first is the weakness and cost of the communications infrastructure. The arrival of numerous undersea cables in the past four years, along with significant investment into terrestrial optical fibre networks in many countries since 2010 (estimated at some $8 billion4), has transformed the continent’s access to broadband internet. But bandwidth is still limited in many markets and its cost ranges widely too, depending largely on the extent to which strong competition has pushed telcos into data. In Kenya, says Pamoja’s Mr Bester, prices are just 10% of those in South Africa. Overall, eastern Africa offers the best conditions for broadband connections, followed by western Africa (see chart).

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4 Lifting barriers to Internet development in Africa: suggestions for improving connectivity,

Analsys Mason for the Internet Society, May 2013

Average price of broadband connection per gigabyte for bundled packages, 2012

Source: Analsys Mason, May 2013

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On top of basic infrastructure problems, the lack of local data centres means that companies using cloud services still generally rely on centres in Europe or India and face international connectivity charges as well as latency problems – slower access to services that is problematic for mission-critical applications. “Infrastructure is still a major challenge in Africa and cloud services are dependent on reliable and high speed access to the internet to be effective,” says Stephen Williams, CEO of Engage IT Global in the UK, who says his teams must still take applications to clients in Africa on stand-alone laptops due to internet reliability issues.

Data security

The second constraint on the growth of cloud services is a large degree of uncertainty on the part of customers around data security and regulatory issues. Customers’ worries about where and how their data is held and what this implies for compliance have been a common phenomenon globally. Indeed in Europe, where data privacy regulations are strong and differ from country to country, these concerns have played a part in the continent’s lag in adoption of cloud services in comparison to the US.

In Africa, regulatory compliance is not the key issue. While Namibia and Madagascar do have onerous legislation requiring authorisation for data to leave the country, the real challenge in most countries is that there are no relevant regulations in place. “It’s a massive grey area,” says Ms Adam of IDC. “There are fears that regulations will change, bringing future compliance concerns.” In South Africa, for example, the government has been discussing a protection of personal information bill that will drive privacy standards since 2007. Since it is still not clear how it will look, many companies are holding off on investments for fear they may have to make big changes. On the regulation of cross-border data, countries are right at the beginning and attempts to come up with continent-wide solutions have not progressed.

Tackling regulatory uncertainty is difficult and is bringing pressure from clients for localisation. “We’re making the rules up as we go along,” says Austin Okere, Managing Director of Computer Warehouse Group in Nigeria. He is starting to sell his cloud-based microfinance application to banks in other African markets. “It would be ideal if we could centralise operations in Nigeria,” he says. “But we expect central banks will want us to host payments data locally.”

For Bright Simons, President of mPedigree Network in Ghana, the lack of detailed regulations on cross-border data provides an opportunity to define new standards that enable radical innovations, as happened with the rapid spread of mobile payments by telcos in eastern Africa. “Companies that are expanding across borders with innovative cloud-based solutions can develop their own standards, which then catch on,” he says. “The regulation is not there yet.”

While the absence of regulations is a headache, potential customers worry more concretely about data security and privacy – losing control over their data and laying themselves open to disclosure if their data is physically located outside their own country, especially in the US or with American companies. Recent revelations of the extent of US surveillance in Europe have not made the issue any easier to handle.

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Fears around keeping sensitive data outside the company have been a common phenomenon globally as cloud services were introduced. But experience elsewhere shows that these concerns are likely to recede gradually as companies realise that data held in the cloud could actually be considerably more secure than it is on their own servers or in small local data centres. A recent survey of over 500 large companies in the US and Europe, for example, showed that while 46% reported that security had been their biggest reason not to move an application to the cloud, 98% said that security had met or exceeded their expectations.5

The reason is that cloud migration forces companies to review and update their own security practices which are often weak and susceptible to error or hacking. One technology executive, currently implementing a SaaS application with a large African enterprise, says he spent six months convincing every level of management that their payroll data would be secure before signing the deal. He was shocked, once they started implementation, to receive the entire payroll data by email!

Similarly, governments around the continent tend to insist on local hosting for their data, while some are happily using Google Apps – a pure cloud-based system, with more than half of its data centres located in the US and none in Africa – for its own email and productivity software needs (see box on SaaS for the public sector).

Concerns around data security and privacy mean that, for the next few years at least, most SaaS applications will be sold in niche areas and advanced processes, such as talent management, wheredata is less sensitive. Few large enterprises with IT systems in place are ready to risk migrating to the cloud entirely. But this will change too. Once there are a good number of cloud projects on the market to learn from, client concerns are likely to shift away from security to the more pressing challenges of managing cloud IT set-ups: managing service levels, ensuring proper integration with legacy systems and avoiding dependence on specific cloud service providers.

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5 Cloud succeeds. Now what? CA Technologies TechInsight Report, May 2013

Public sector under a cloud?

Weak governance, lack of infrastructure and shortage of money remain the biggest obstacles to growth across Africa. According to Bright Simons, President of mPedigree and a profound believer in the power of technology, the cloud could be a way to get around all three problems, if Africans are willing to think differently. “The cost of trying to replicate the kind of health and education systems they have in the West is mind-bogglingly high,” he says. “If we want to do this well and quickly, we have to em-brace the cloud in ways that have not been done before. We are primed to do so and we can achieve what they did at a fraction of the cost.”

For most technology providers, the idea of selling the cloud model to the public sector raises a wry laugh and a shake of the head, for a number of reasons. The first is localisation. Governments generally insist on having a tier 3 data centre locally – possibly serving just the needs of its

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Risk vs benefit

The third constraint on the development of the SaaS model in Africa –and the one that channel partners can do most to overcome – is the perception that the business benefits of shifting applications to the cloud do not outweigh the risks. In the US, in particular, it is the business advantages rather than cost benefits that are now driving rapid adoption of SaaS applications in the US, according to the authors of the North Bridge survey6.

In Africa, this is not yet the case. “The advantages are not seen as compelling enough to take the leap,” says KPMG’s Mr Rizzo. “There have to be strategic business reasons – some value that the company would not have had if it had been in a legacy environment.”

Everyone likes to quote the lack of legacy as an advantage for developing the cloud in Africa, and there is already interest in SaaS and other cloud services from fast-growing African SMEs, which are looking primarily for cheap and flexible ways of building IT support from scratch. For these companies, where executives are more likely to be using their own smartphones, tablets and laptops than a company PC system, shifting straight to the cloud makes complete sense. The potential among these companies will be huge in future, especially as they expand beyond their own markets – but most are

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6 The Future of Cloud Computing. http://www.northbridge.com/2013-cloud-computing-survey

ministries. “It is currently very difficult to sell the idea of hosting an application or data from a data centre outside the country,” says Jean-Baptiste Blanc, Vice President at Catalyst, based in Dubai.

Ministries also find it difficult to shift to a leasing model because they don’t know how to finance it.It doesn’t fit the model of budget planning and it doesn’t fit the donor model, where much of the financial support for big IT purchases comes from. And there is virtually no opportunity for slicing a percentage off the top. Finally, a shared services model on the cloud – bringing together hospitals, universities or ministries, for example – makes decision-making tricky. Who drives the initiative forward? Who owns the project?

Nevertheless, there are a few exceptions. Rwanda, for example, has shifted all its ministries on to a community cloud. Nigeria is creating a common depository of knowledge accessible to all doctors. And many governments – in Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa among others –have cloud solutions high up on their technology agenda, according to KPMG’s Frank Rizzo.

Mr Simons believes that those seeds of interest in cloud solutions could be enough to transform public policy in Africa, if combined with the interests of the private sector through innovative public-private partnerships (PPPs). “The cloud could be a game-changer. It will help the private sector minimise the risks in PPPs,” he says, pointing to non-payment, incompetent systems and corruption. “Governments are not equipped to spend creatively, but the private sector is incentivised to use optimal technology to avoid the downside of working with government.”

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not yet ready to spend the amounts needed even in a pay-as-you-go model. “SMEs are potentially the biggest growth sector,” says Catalyst’s Mr Blanc. “They are very happy to receive SaaS offers, but the challenge is still the pricing.”

The reality for now is that most mature customers – and certainly the ones with enough money to pay for complex IT systems – do generally have some sort of on-premise system in place. South African customers, especially, tend to find it hard to make a business case for migrating to the cloud. Most have invested in a system, even if old and clunky now. Cloud services have yet to be tried and tested by their peers and foreign case studies often appear irrelevant. “Customers in South Africa are not sure of this cloud thing yet,” says Mohammed Zakaria, based in Johannesburg with Evosys, which has sold several SaaS solutions in the Gulf. “They are taking a wait-and-see attitude. They have no idea how these solutions might solve their problems; which pain areas it can address.”

In fast-emerging markets like Kenya, Ghana or Nigeria, there is significant interest in SaaS solutions among smaller and middle-sized companies, but again the largest customers already have IT systems in place – and these tend to be relatively new ones, sold in the past few years. Convincing clients to look at cloud options requires a lot of hand-holding that most technology providers are still unable to provide. Pierre Lamboray, co-founder and managing director for Africa at Popay, which specialises in HR solutions, puts it this way: “Market maturity is also about learning how to sell – understanding the advantages of the cloud model.”

Most IT companies are used to selling complex, customisable, large-ticket products to IT directors, spend-ing months on implementation and making a significant amount of money on maintenance, upgrades and support. SaaS is more likely to require a service sell to a business user before the IT director gets involved, explaining the strategic business value of the software rather than its technical specifications. It also requires higher volumes of business to compensate for lower margins and involves faster turnaround times.

Indeed for many sellers, the introduction of SaaS is the perfect nightmare – the same kind of pressure on margins that hit brick-and-mortar retailers when Amazon came along – and the initial reaction worldwide has been to see the threat more than the opportunity.

A recent report by Forrester7, looking at partner strategies in North America and Europe, puts it this way: “After much gnashing of teeth (over marginalised profitability and disrupted cashflow) and dragging of feet (on the decision to reinvest in and remake their businesses), channel partners have finally begun to adopt – and build – cloud solutions into their solutions portfolios in a big way.” Its survey showed, however, that over a third of partners still said they were not interested in getting into SaaS or managed services. Forrester’s verdict: “Without some stake in cloud solutions, their businesses are going to decline and lose value.”

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7 Cloud Channel Trends, 2013 to 2014: a critical mass of channel partners are embracing

cloud, February 2013

http://www.forrester.com/pimages/rws/reprints/document/90001/oid/1-LMIK8X

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Big Data in Africa

One of the cloud buzzwords electrifying both business and the public sector in the US and Europe is Big Data. The name makes it sound complex, but it is really an extension of data analytics, with cloud-enabled nuances. “It’s about combining internal and external data quickly and using it to add value,” says David Ives, general manager of Karabina Solutions in South Africa, who sees Big Data not as a luxury nice-to-have but as extremely relevant for tackling African companies’ typical challenges. “For companies to be enabled,” he says, “they need information.”

Ask most people about the potential for Big Data in Africa, though, and they’ll start by pointing to the paucity of data on anything. Few companies have had mainframes churning out data for years, while finding reliable, up-to-date information from the public sector is impossible. But the internet and new analytic tools are starting to change that by facilitating the use of real-time, unstructured data. “The availability of data is not the big problem,” says Mr Ives. “You just need smart technologies to collect it and classify it, dealing with variety, velocity and complexity.”

Social networks and mobile phones, for example, generate massive amounts of data in real time that, with advanced data analytics, can be used to understand consumer needs and react quickly. Perfected as a business tool by the likes of Google and Amazon, Africa’s fast-growing new online retailers, such as Nigeria’s Jumia, are using Big Data to work out what to sell to whom and how to deliver.

While agile, techy SMEs are likely to remain at the cutting edge of Big Data applications, the real potential is solving problems at the heart of established companies. An African satellite TV provider, for example, was able to use social network data to solve one of its thorny service challenges: how to deal with a sudden rush of angry customer complaints in its call centres when service faded due to major storms. Data scientists were able to create software that monitors twitter feeds for clues that a significant storm is on its way. That gives the company a warning about 20 minutes before the calls start pouring in, allowing them to inform people proactively of the problem and prepare the call centre for the deluge.

Mining companies, too, are starting to use complex Big Data systems to monitor their costs better, controlling their energy use to avoid fines for overuse, for example, or optimizing the use of open shaft and deep mines, by overlaying data on weather, labour shifts and fleet movement.

Another huge source of data that, until recently was difficult for companies to use, comes from machines. Vehicle fleets have instruments that can be used to manage the performance of drivers, saving fuel costs and reducing wear and tear on machines. Containers can be tracked to manage supply chains better, speeding up the cash cycle. The Namibian port authority, for example, worked with landlocked Botswana to create a corridor to the port, with a tracking system to monitor and manage deliveries. That allowed Namibia to bid for business that had been going to the overrun Durban port, and helped the Botswana Meat Commission to keep its lucrative beef export contracts to the EU – its second biggest source of export revenue after diamonds.

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Government authorities are also starting to look at ways to collect better data through satellites, social media and machines to verify demographic trends, control traffic, manage water resources and track the spread of diseases – to name just a few areas. And, as governments appreciate the value of data more, they are also starting to collect it and make it available on the internet. The African Development Bank opened online access to all its data in 2013, while Kenya started its Open Data project in 2012 by posting the full census results in a usable format. Ghana and Tunisia are also making data available as part of the Open Data initiative. According to Linet Kwamboka, a Kenyan data scientist working on the initiative, the shift to transparency is expected to improve decision-making within government, while also affecting how the private sector interacts with government and does business.

“I see Big Data as a hot topic for Africa,” says Ashraf Gamal, Commercial Director of Egabi in Egypt. “The market is ready – they see the value.”

All change? Strategic approaches to selling SaaS

Market conditions are not yet ripe for SaaS solutions to be dominant, even in the next five years in Africa. But the cloud is not going away. Prabu Balasubramanyan, Executive Director of TransSys, an Indian partner selling SaaS solutions in east Africa, expects that within that time-period every African company will be using at least one cloud solution.

Mr Okere of CWG also believes that the trend of virtualising the delivery of software is inevitable, pushing technology companies to transform themselves in the same way retailers or logistics companies have had to. Executives will start to insist on having the kind of flexibility to access what they need from any device and at any time that they have as consumers. “It will be increasingly difficult in future for any company that does not have a strategy for virtual products delivered through a virtual channel to succeed,” he says.

If the long-term perspective is clear, the short-term one – finding a feasible business model to sell SaaS services – is less so. “The value chain for how the cloud benefits clients, partners and vendors is not clear,” says Ashraf Gamal, Commercial Director at Egabi in Egypt. “It’s hard to convince the client, when you don’t understand the value yourself.”

The benefits of SaaS solutions are simple to outline. They provide the promise of high quality, easy use and a decent price, leveraging economies of scale on state-of-the-art software. They tend to have the latest features, better functionality, easier remote and mobile access and cleaner, more intuitive user-friendly interfaces – but also demand more standardised processes from the client. They offer automatic updates and improvements, easier collaboration and simpler administration – and with some help, interoperability with existing legacy systems. The cost is designed to be lower than on-premise systems, although not – as still happens in Africa – if companies calculate the return over 5-10 years with no upgrades.

Understanding the value for clients is more difficult and requires partners to approach clients differently, focusing on identifying and solving specific problems, rather than selling a product.

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The need for consultative selling skills explains the relative advantage in Africa of specialists, who already speak the language of their clients. “I barely mention the SaaS model,” says Popay’s Mr Lamboray. “I leave open whether the solution should be on-premise or cloud-based and I don’t try to sell it around upgrades and maintenance.” Another important consideration, he says, is to tackle the fear factor: “I show clients that they often are already using the cloud without knowing it.”

Others focus their sell on the ease of use and lower upfront costs. “We approach the client from the point of view that there is less headache on their side,” says Egabi’s Mr Gamal. “They just get service rather than the hassle of buying software, implementing it and hoping it works. All you have to do is make your monthly payment. You can forget management and maintenance.”

IT directors still play a key role in large companies in determining whether they are willing to try the SaaS model or reject it due to worries around security and control. Here, references and ISO certifications for data centres are crucial. But since SaaS offers the promise of service without IT staff, it is crucial to ensure that the IT director feels empowered to leverage the broader resources of the cloud, rather than threatened by the transfer of control. “Some of the challenges with cloud are similar to those faced with offshoring,” says Engage IT Global’s Mr Williams. “It’s not a one size fits all. You need to come up with the right mix of cloud and traditional and make sure that the client gets the advantages without the troubles.”

Understanding the business value of selling the SaaS model for partners is even more challenging. Companies that have focused on selling licences, without offering services and their own additionalapplications, will find the SaaS model difficult to sell and monetise successfully. The first challenge is the pay-as-you-go model which transforms an up-front percentage on a licence into small amounts of income spread out over three or more years, causing cashflow challenges and requiring more complex billing. In a volatile environment it can also be particularly unattractive. “Is it better for me to get $500,000 now or $700,000 over three years?” asks Egabi’s Mr Gamal. “In Egypt, where it is so up and down, it may be the first.”

The second challenge is that SaaS solutions need to be sold in volume to create a feasible business. If the potential customers, for now at least, are smallish businesses, along with a few small branch offices of multinationals and niche areas in Africa’s blue chips, then a handful of deals a year won’t be enough to survive. “The focus needs to be on demand generation,” says Evosys’s Mr Zakaria. “The big question is: can we turn it into a volume business? We really need to work on understanding the business model.”

Thirdly, to profit from this low-margin business, partners will also need to use it as a foot in the door to provide additional, higher-margin support services to their SaaS clients, such as localization, implementation, niche applications or extensions to existing applications and data hosting. For the next few years, at least, most providers will need to build a hybrid model, selling SaaS alongside traditional products and services. “For some channel partners, that’s a major shift, needing transformation at the level of sales organisation, skills and management” says IDC’s Ms Adam.

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So why bother trying to sell SaaS at all? The simple answer is that it’s happening, driven by both technology and the market, and it will gradually transform enterprise technology in Africa, adding significant value to the economy. The potential is not hype – it will just take time to develop.

For the next few years, having SaaS skills will offer a competitive advantage, but not a viable revenue stream on its own. Once the SaaS market reaches critical mass, however, having cloud skills will become standard, with the quality of services becoming the differentiator. Those without the capacity will not be able to compete in selling applications; those who enter the market once it is more mature may also find it difficult to develop skills quickly enough.

“It will take time before it generates sales by itself and I see some companies putting it on hold and waiting for the market to mature a bit,” says Popay’s Mr Lamboray. “But things are moving fast. There is a huge dif-ference in the response to SaaS offerings even in the past six months. We are pushing to be there – learning how to sell, how to organize the sales force and work with various partners. It’s quite a learning curve for us.” Or, as Egabi’s Mr Gamal puts it: “We want to be one of the key players. We don’t want to depend on the old traditional way of doing things.”

Some of the questions we will discuss in the interactive workshop:

• Whichcustomersrespondbesttopay-as-you-gomodels–isitrightforpublicsectorandbigplayers or more for SMEs? Who responds best: CIOs, CFOs, business heads, other functions?

• Istheresufficientfixedandmobileinfrastructureinplacetosupportclouddevelopment?

• Whatisthemainattractionfortheclient:accessibility,productivityandotherbusinessadvantages or affordability, shifting from capex to opex, simplifying IT management?

• Howtodealwithconcernsabouttrust,regulatoryconstraintsforpublicsectorcustomers.

• WhatarethemainchallengesinimplementingandrunningSaaSsolutions?

• FindingaworkablebusinessmodelforsellingSaaSsolutions

• WheredoesBigDatafitintothecloudpicture?

• CouldSaaSprovideanothertechnologyleapforAfrica,asmobilesdid?

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Mobility and the cloud: Africa’s true mobile revolution has yet to startBy Bright B. Simons

The United States economy is nine times the size of Africa’s, but Africa has twice as many mobile phones.

This tantalising statistic would seem to indicate that, in the mobile era, Africa’s time has come. But the mobile subscriber numbers are only part of the story. So far, the buzz about African mobile has been about the consumer side of things. I believe, though, that it is at the enterprise level that mobile could truly become a game changer for Africa, enabling the building of massive fortunes, and perhaps even the much anticipated recycling of innovation from Africa to the West.

The focus on consumers up to now has been perfectly understandable. That is where the results are already visible. It is consumers that have made Africa the fastest growing mobile market in the world. It is consumer spending that is driving all the value added services — including mobile payments — that everyone seems so excited about. Whilst the subscriber growth has been astounding, a critical look at value creation however show how much more needs to be done before mobile can shift African economies. For instance, the United Kingdom, with barely 7% of Africa’s population, has a bigger telecom industry in terms of revenue. That’s why the enterprise side of things has seized my imagination.

To the extent that the African enterprise has been relevant in the mobile story so far, it has been about the telephone companies themselves. It is amazing how enthusiastically African telecoms have, for instance, embraced the cloud, where “cloud” means accessing the enterprise’s intellectual assets more in the way one accesses a utility, like tap water, instead of a local resource, like, say, a borehole.

African telecoms have in fact done more than embrace the cloud; they have unpacked their infrastructure: selling radio masts to third parties and leasing them back; grabbing seamless, turnkey solutions for billing, customer discovery, relationship management, and service delivery from big vendors with a gusto that would make a western CIO gulp for air.

Much of the esoteric quibbling about private and public clouds and legacy infrastructure that has frustrated vendors in Europe and America has been bypassed in Africa as telecom companies prioritise cost and comfort over culture and security.

Given how open-minded African telecom companies have been about the cloud, they should have no qualms about pushing enterprise mobility; they have no hang-ups.

This puts African telecom companies in a position to promote an open-minded, hang-up free approach to enterprise mobility. But so far they’ve concentrated their marketing power at consumers, and invested in selling mainly broadband-related products to the corporate sector. On enterprise mobility they’re still at the starting line.

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Which is why the opportunity is so thrilling. The market is completely open. It could be anyone’s game.

To understand what I mean by “enterprise mobility”, look at your own recent working practices. How often do you use your mobile phone or tablet for work-related activity? Do you have a company-issued mobile phone or tablet? Is its use governed by company-level policies? Are you allowed access to critical company data outside the four walls of the business? What does “four walls” mean if you are a travelling salesperson, or on call after work hours to respond to crises? How does the company judge whether it is really you making that call or pulling that piece of data from its vaults? In low-infrastructure settings like Africa, these questions are double-pressing.

Most African corporations, especially in the private sector, are only now in a position to think deeply about information technology (IT). Unlike in the West, where corporate policies on IT easily date back five decades, and where systems deployed two decades ago are still in operation, the African enterprise has discovered IT just at the onset of cloud-thinking. The dissolving of corporate boundaries is not science fiction to the average African manager; she contends with the realities and frustrations every day.

Intriguingly, the African IT manager has very little influence over the enterprise as a whole. The notion of the CIO is still in its infancy. When it becomes obvious that IT is a bottom-line matter, it is the CEO who usually has to make the call.

If the CEO gets what’s at stake, then — given the unique advantages of the African setting for all things mobile — the whole enterprise is likely to embrace cloud and mobility with a seamlessness and finality that is impossible to achieve in the West. And when such a bug successfully infects one company it could very easily affect its entire industry, because mobile has always been a viral technology.

What do we have here then? Surely, it is the perfect mix of ingredients for a massive boom: a huge, self-defin-ing, market opportunity; incumbents without a clear plan; limited penetration by established vendors; motivat-ing cost factors; favorable surrounding culture (ie mobile is hot); and massive latent needs. Just the sort of environment likely to spawn a host of medium-sized innovators, always the right catalyst for a boom.

There is, however, one really big if. African economies are still hyper-dependent on government spending - a legacy of the socialist infrastructure put in place after independence. For there to be an enterprise mobility boom, there also needs to be a broader enterprise boom and rebalancing of economies away from government and toward the private sector.

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Such economic change typically comes in stages. The current consumer boom in Africa is based on the f irst steps toward private sector empowerment that were taken in the 1980s, when most African countries’ economies were shrinking. Now, with the consumer boom spurring real growth all over the continent, we may be due for an even bigger spurt of private sector expansion.

Simply put: the consumer boom could fuel an enterprise boom which would in turn keep consumer spending rising. And this enterprise boom offers the platform for a mobile explosion so dramatic that it could dwarf the change and growth Africa have seen so far in the mobile-enabled space — and launch Africa into the global economic big leagues.

There’s no guarantee that all this will happen, of course. But the ingredients are in place.

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Briefing Papers by:

ORACLE:

• Roundtable 1: How can partners make money and enhance their relationship with customers through SaaS and PaaS?

• Roundtable 2: How to save money on implementation using Oracle Rapid Start

•Roundtable 3: Teaming up with Oracle to win BIG deals in data centre and integration solutions

•Oracle Support Demystified: engineered to support customers together

•Oracle, Partners and Customers: engineered to work ethically together

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How can partners make money and enhance their relationship with customers through SaaS and PaaS?By Liam Nolan and Sanjay Sinha

SaaS and PaaS – going to the next level

If there’s one thing certain in business it’s “change”. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the world of technology.

In the past, a measure of the IT complexity of a business was the size of its in-house IT support team, equipped with sufficient skills to support the business applications required to execute on strategy. In recent years a new trend has emerged. Just as companies are happy to outsource requirements like power supply or utility provision, it is now considered effective to outsource business application provision and technology platforms too.

This trend started with the outsourcing of requirements such as sales automation and mail systems, but it has now expanded into such requirements as Human Resources, Recruitment and ERP systems. Platform outsourcing has also grown in popularity.

Why should I care?

Gartner forecasts that the global cloud market will be US$131 billion in 20138 and growing – with the largest growth forecast for emerging markets including Middle East and Africa. Can you afford not to get involved?

Why is cloud so compelling?

Over the years, in-house IT functions have grown in order to support systems which get more complex by the week. The value-add in such support services is difficult to ascertain and the value-add to the shareholder well – that’s even more difficult……Our research has shown that up to 70% of IT spend goes on maintaining exist-ing applications and platforms with the remainder spent enhancing or providing new services. So enterprises are spending 70% of their IT budget just to stand still – that’s a sobering thought!

Cloud can have a very positive effect on total cost of ownership (TCO) and return on investment (ROI):

• Costsarepredictable–youknowexactlywhatthesubscriptioncostsarefromdayone.

• Thecostsarefundedfromoperationalexpenditureratherthancapitalexpenditure.

8 Forecast Overview: Public Cloud Services, Worldwide, 2011-2016, 4Q12 Update

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• SpecificallyforSaaS,astheproviderdevelopsnewfeatures,thesearetypicallyincludedinthecore product as part of the offering to which the customer has already subscribed

• Thecloudproviderisresponsibleforthehardware,alongwithitsfailoverprovision and maintenance.

• Noresourcesneedtobedeployedtosupporttheinfrastructure.

• Typically,upgradestakelesstimetodeployandtest.

• Elasticcapacityisoftenincluded,givingthesubscribertheaddedadvantageofincreased processing power depending on usage requirements.

Rethinking the model and moving the maintenance and provision of commodity services to the cloud allows companies to redirect some of the 70% “maintenance” spend towards provision of new services.

Oh, but it’s my data – sitting out on the web – isn’t that risky?!

A regular concern aired by businesses considering a SaaS deployment is security of data. Where is the data centre? Do the service providers have access to my data? Is it encrypted? In addressing security concerns, it’s important to consider a number of different levels: - Data centre: Physical security, including who has access and what procedures are in place for inspections. In what jurisdiction the data centre is deployed can also be relevant depending on the customer.

- Database: How is the data stored and secured? What backup and disaster/failover recovery options and recovery points are in place?

- Network security: When data is transferred across the network (both within and outside the application), what encryption techniques are employed?

- Application security: Can I control who has access to what data and what activities they can carry out with the data?

Multi-Tenancy

Many cloud operators operate under a multi-tenancy model, which means that a customer’s data is in the same application as other people’s data. This is important to know because, in this model, the supplier must upgrade all customers at once. There is no alternative and the customer must work to the supplier’s schedule – not their own! Let’s say, down the road, the customer decides they want to terminate the service – how do they get at their data, or how does the provider eliminate the data from the “single instance” when the service is terminated?

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Oracle operates a virtual tenancy model, whereby the hardware is shared but each client instance is separate. This offers huge advantages to the end-customer:

- Reduced risk of data being shared inadvertently

- More control and a say in how and when maintenance is carried out

- If the customer wants to discontinue the service or move to an on-premise solution, then a copy of the environment can be provided

Who should consider SaaS?

SaaS is a wonderful option to have available but is not necessarily the ideal solution for everyone.

• Iftheprospectiswillingtoworktobest-practiceprocessesandfeatures,thenSaaSshouldbe considered. However, if the client feels that they need to customise the product to support their particular requirements, then maybe an on-premise or hosted environment is a better option. The level of extensibility and configuration options are significant influencing factors in the decision.

• Iftheprospecthaslimitedinternalresourcestosupportakeybusinessapplicationthenagain a SaaS option offers an alternative.

• Iftimeisagainsttheprospect,cloudoptionstypicallyofferaquickerturnaroundtime,removing hardware procurement and provisioning from the critical path.

But I’m a partner, what’s in it for me…

The cloud paradigm offers enormous opportunity for the system integrator (SI) community. Typically, the cloud provider will provide the environment, but the setup and configuration of that environment is a separate exercise. As with traditional on-premise solutions, the systems integrator must work with the end-customer to advise on the appropriate configurations and integrations and implement these designs. The cloud removes the need for install and maintenance skills.

In many cases the cloud solution being implemented needs to be integrated with non-cloud solutions. The SI plays an important role in delivering this requirement, bringing both the integration skills and thecloud application knowledge. In addition, an implementation still requires training, data conversion and level 1 support.

Since cloud implementations lend themselves to configuration rather than customisation, there is often repeat work from one project to the next. So from the SI perspective, the resources can quickly come up to speed with the configuration options and move from one implementation to the next, reusing work products when required.

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Partners can use cloud technologies to enhance their relationships with customers

Businesses need fresh thinking about the architecture of tomorrow. Merely rehabbing or adding on to the existing plan will not meet the different and more demanding requirements of tomorrow. Oracle partners can engage their clients at a strategic level, upgrading their current IT-centric focus into a broader vision fora sweeping transformation of their entire enterprise.

Today’s line-of-business (LOB) executives have increasing budgetary discretion and autonomy in making decisions about their operational applications. Nowhere is this more evident than in Sales and Human Resources decision-makers embracing SaaS for Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Human Capital Management (HCM). For these business executives, SaaS equals speed – their application is delivered on the browser, they get the latest updates quickly, with the ability to get new features at a faster rate.

Oracle provides a single, consistent, cloud architecture and customisation layer for SaaS, using Oracle’s PaaS capabilities for a complete solution built on open standards. Partners can translate their technical skills and delivery capabilities directly to Oracle’s PaaS. Oracle’s approach to cloud deployments is location-independent with respect to who owns and operates the data centre, giving customers and partners flexibility and choice.

Mobility, plus social engagement with transactional capabilities, gives companies a new way to moveat the speed of their customers, new methods for engaging with customers to build entirely new revenue streams, not just incremental transactions. The bring-your-own-device (BYOD) trend can be turned from a vexing IT challenge into an opportunity for partners to engage clients to use IT as an innovation lever. Oracle capabilities for user-interface design span from portable and device-independent rendering, to rich capabilities on native devices. Fast growing markets around the globe have the highest propensity to embrace SaaS applications on mobile devices, for both business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) applications.

To summarise…

Adopting cloud technologies gives an enterprise the opportunity to reduce TCO for business applications and platforms without compromising on service. They also allow it to focus on applications and services that make a strategic difference to their customers and, in turn, their balance sheet.

So if it’s good for the customer, well, it can only be good for the partner also….right?

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How to save money on implementation using Oracle Rapid StartBy Sarkis Kerkezian

The SaaS delivery model represents a paradigm shift in how and for whom software is developed. Oracle’s cloud-based Fusion Applications promise the end-user easy implementation and maintenance, cost savings and high quality, based on the adoption of best practices inherent in the applications. The Rapid Start Implementation methodology is designed to ensure that this promise is realised. The full name is the Oracle Unified Method (OUM) Cloud Application Services Implementation Approach.

Why is the Rapid Start Implementation methodology important for success? What does it bring for customers?

SaaS customers pay a monthly subscription fee for the use of software and are eager to start benefiting from it as quickly as possible. The Rapid Start approach emphasizes getting customers up and running on the new system in less time and at a lower cost. This rapid-time-to-value approach focuses on leveraging the best practices and rich product functionalities inherent in the products and the implementation ofstandard business rules, standard integrations and standard data loads. This is coupled with the relatively insignificant time required for the hosted infrastructure availability and readiness.

The methodology also relies heavily on the Fusion/SaaS capabilities that give the end user the ability to modify applications and build their own custom reports, relying on mature technology frameworks that allow for testing and deploying application extensions at run time. These factors enable customers to realise the benefits of the system in a shorter timeframe, achieving rapid returns on their IT investments and a focus on their industry core competencies.

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RAPID TIME TO VALUE

How is this implementation methodology different from others? The Rapid Start approach is release-based. Since SaaS customers expect immediate value from their subscription, there is a critical need to deliver useful functionality relatively quickly. One of the ways this can be achieved is to break the full scope of the functionality that the customer ultimately requires into smaller pieces and then deliver that larger set in a piecemeal fashion over a series of releases.

Each release focuses on providing usable, and beneficial, incremental capability, until the full set of desired functionality is in place. Early releases focus on providing baseline functionality, leaving less critical, complementary functionality for later releases.

The OUM implementation methodology is one of the best SaaS deployment models across the globe since it is based on best-of-breed implementation practices with the joint effort of fusion product

development and Oracle Methods team taking into account all implementation activities and tasks.

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What critical success factors need to be considered?

There are several critical success factors to be considered by customers and partners to ensure the success of Fusion/SaaS Solution deployments:

• Business Sponsorship: Project executive sponsorship and a project steering committee are essential for a fast decision-making process. In some instances, business processes might require re-engineering to align with the application functionality. Business process owners should be available during the project in order to take key decisions related to the adoption of standard business processes.

• ChangeManagement:Morefocusandeffortwillberequiredbytheprojectteamtomanagethe change associated with the shift in paradigm, standardisation of processes, regulatory policies, hosting policies, security policies, SaaS vendor policies, environment maintenance, environment patching & upgrades, IT organisation roadmap, resources skill set, financial implications, training etc.

• CustomerRetention:Toretaincustomersoverthelongterm,partnersmustdeliveron promises made, and invest time and effort following the implementation to stay involved with the customer’s business and continually demonstrate value. Account growth is virtually non-existent without proper implementation, guidance, application adoption, education and training and subscription renewal.

• ClearDivisionofResponsibility:Aspartoftheimplementationmethodologyandtohelpachieve a lower implementation cost, a number of activities performed during the project are shared between Oracle, partner and client personnel. Where appropriate, some activities are assigned solely to client resources, such as extracting data from client legacy systems. Also each task description contains a Roles and Responsibility section delineating who is responsible for the completion of that task.

Why should partners consider using this methodology?

The methodology helps partner to focus on generating consistent revenue streams from customer engagements. Undertaking a full solution in a single project is relatively more risky and subject to phase end milestone completion sign-offs and long project durations. The Fusion/SaaS applications implementation approach is “release” based and is guided through the principles of interactive/iterative agile approach, focusing on high-priority business processes and requirements with specific project governance arrangements. By using this approach, the partner works with the customer to define an initial baseline set of functionality benefits that can be delivered in 8 to 12 weeks or less. Based on that foundation, the functionality can be expanded in later releases to achieve the full to be solution. The release plans are tailored according to measured business benefits for the customer and can be spread over a certain or complete subscription period.

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Through this approach, partners can overcome the hurdle of project budget overruns and inconsistent cash flow injections and generate steady and guaranteed monthly revenues throughout the engagement.

How can Oracle help partners use OUM successfully?

The Collaborative Engagement Program (CEP) Team in cooperation with the Fusion product development Center of Excellence (CoE) team has launched a “Go to Market Initiative & Implementation Assurance” programme.

This enables partners to come up with their own Fusion Rapid Start offerings/startup packs leveraging on the Fusion/SaaS Rapid Start implementation Methodology.

The Rapid Start offerings model is designed specifically for Oracle Fusion Applications. They provide a fixed scope, low cost and short duration option for clients to help them get applications up and running quickly and efficiently. From the partners’ perspective, the model is repeatable and predictable.

Some of the key features associated with Fusion Applications Rapid Start Offerings include:

• Rapiddesign,configuration,anddeployment

• Configurationofstandardfunctionality

• Lowerconfigurationcostsandfastertimetovalue • PartnersmustdevelopfixedscopeofferingsbasedonmaterialsavailablefromOraclePartner Network and Oracle Business Accelerators (OBA)

• OfferingscanfollowtheOUMCloudWorkBreakdownStructure

• RelyontheOUMFusionSaaSImplementationmethodology

• ForSaaS,solutionsshouldemphasiseanout-of-the-boxphilosophy

Through this programme, Oracle provides the best practice content to accelerate adoption and support. This ensures that every implementation delivers consistent quality to the customer. But it also ensures that proven partners are strategically aligned and recognised and that they are able to realise the Go to Market benefits.

To get involved, partners are required to deliver competitive implementation service offerings built of standard cloud service paradigms, simplified Implementation Methodology that promotes rapid deployment and adoption, along with value-added services to optimise future releases and ongoing adoption of Fusion SaaS Applications.

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Oracle Fusion Applications

Rapid Start (RS) Offerings

RS offerings deliver ready-to-use applications quickly, easily and cost-effectively through an approach that emphasises an “out-of-the box”

philosophy and adoption of the best practices inherent in the product. This approach is ideal for customers that prefer rapid time to value. For customers desiring higher levels of customisation, the RS are an

excellent way to establish a baseline instance for the start of a tailored implementation project.

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Teaming up with Oracle to win BIG deals in data centre and integration solutionsBy Sedat Zencirci

An optimized data centre must have the ability to go beyond data warehousing, supporting multiple use cases, with different data latency and different transformation points.

Companies need to be able to consolidate and cleanse data to ensure it is reliable and trustworthy - and so capable of supporting their business. They need a bulk data-loading solution, a data transformation platform that can leverage the full power of the data centre’s resources and provide the simplest setup and fastest overall performance.

They also need to be able to deploy new database versions and new applications without taking downtime - and that means the best solution for streaming data into data centres in real time, and capturing changes with very low latency and millisecond replication (if necessary, for different Oracle versions and for converting non-Oracle to Oracle in real time).

Finally, customers need a guarantee of high availability, ideally with a read-capable standby system that can be used for reporting and also leveraged for pre-production testing.

Why should Oracle partners be interested?

Selecting the right data integration solution (DIS) is critical to realising the benefits of cloud computing. The DIS must provide high performance, the ability to handle spikes well and scale both easily and cost-efficiently – all at a low cost of ownership to allow customers to benefit from cost-savings in the cloud.

DI tools assist in managing new and emerging types of data that are resulting from the data explosion. Point-to-point integration architectures cannot keep up with business growth and represent weak links in mission critical integration scenarios. With DIS, partners can minimise lack of integration, fragmentation, silo-based practices, and one-off solutions, which lead to downtime and poor system performance. This brings the customer not just a greater ROI but increased Return on Data: ie reporting accuracy.

The data integration market in Africa is experiencing high levels of growth. Oracle’s portfolio of heterogeneous Data Integration Solutions – Oracle GoldenGate, Oracle Data Integrator, Oracle Enterprise Data Quality and Active Data Guard – is consistently recognised by both customers and independent analysts, such as Gartner and Forrester, as providing market-leading functionality, performance and reliability. Adoption of Oracle DIS products continues to grow rapidly within both the Oracle and non-Oracle database and applications customers and offers a substantial business opportunity for partners to leverage Oracle DIS technologies for customer benefit.

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Oracle’s Data Integration Solutions provides a proven, robust and scalable “state-of-the-art” data integration platform foundation, which enables partners to sell and deliver the best possible Oracle solutions for customers.

The advantages to partners are that DIS:

• iseasytoposition,learnandimplement

• bringsgoodsalesresults since every meeting with existing customers provides the opportunity to sell data integration too offerings

• offers the ability to bundle attractively with other products since, unlike legacy systems, data integration tools have built-in connectivity capabilities enabling extraction from many source technologies, thus extend the life of old apps.

• bringsquick returns and good overall margins, since the ratio of services revenue vs licence revenue can be very high at around 3:1

• isanexcellententry point for big projects

Future prospects

Data integration holds a central and strategic position in IT infrastructure, providing control over current and future hardware and technology projects like consolidations and cloud migration. As a result, the buying centers for data integration and application integration are merging into one unit – the integration competency centre – responsible for establishing and maintaining the physical integration of applications and data, and forecasting future requirements.

That gives an advantage to large vendors like Oracle and IBM which will dominate the market in the medium term. To deliver this integration, Oracle is looking at how to create a single contact point, offering discounting across all the software groups, along with one contract for support, one place of installation and one training to attend.

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Oracle Support Demystified: engineered to support customers togetherBy Rafal Dabrowski

Support is one of Oracle’s Lifecycle Services, like Consulting and Oracle University training, which cut across traditional organizational silos to address the unique and diverse needs of our customers. The Support Organization is present in more than 60 countries globally, with 15,500 global employees, most of them product experts, catering to over 100,000 customers. It is the largest revenue generator for Oracle as a line of business, so it is critical that support is a structured and high-quality deliverable.

Unlike other enterprise IT vendors, Oracle delivers support for all products using one unified services organisation, one unified support platform and one unified support offering: Oracle Premier Support. As a result, Oracle offers partners a level of service no other provider can—combining direct access to vendor expertise, tools and product updates with a single point of accountability for all Oracle solution

Oracle Premier SupportProviding great customer service is as important as providing great products. That’s why technology-enabled problem prevention and performance optimisation is included in standard support coverage for Oracle Database, Oracle Fusion Middleware and Oracle applications. The My Oracle Support platform delivers a web-based, personalised and proactive support experience through a single point of entry and integrated dashboard.

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Oracle Premier Support comprises the following offering:

• Programme updates, fixes, security alerts, critical patch updates • Tax/legal updates

• Upgrade scripts

• Tailored knowledge management and guided search capabilities to quickly locate relevant articles and technical information

• Certification with most of the new third party products and versions

• Access to My Oracle Support and the technical support analysts 24x7

• Non-technical support within local business hours

• Spare parts and onsite field engineers (HW Support)

Oracle Lifetime Support Policy

Given the sizeable investments customers make in Oracle technology, it is important that support continues once new products are introduced. Premier Support is available for Oracle Database, Oracle Fusion Middleware and Oracle applications for five years from the general availability (GA) date. Extended Support puts the customer in control of their upgrade strategy by offering an extra three years of maintenance and upgrades for select Oracle software releases at an additional fee. Sustaining Support maximises the customer’s investment protection by providing maintenance for as long as a company uses the Oracle software. Features include access to Oracle online support tools, upgrade rights, pre-existing fixes and assistance from technical support experts.

Oracle Advanced Customer Support

Oracle Advanced Customer Support (ACS) Services is a global organisation within Customer Support Services providing tailored mission-critical support services to customers and helping partners deliver such services. Some 94% of the S&P Global 100 companies, 78% of the global Fortune 100 companies and nine of the top ten banks use ACS Services. ACS teams cut across multiple industries from telecommunications, to finance, public sector and government and cover every product, from hardware to database, Fusion Middleware and applications. Oracle engineers have specific industry experience, high level business experience and a global networking framework that can be leveraged to provide tailored solutions for each customer.

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ACS has a wide breadth of truly world class support offerings that are placed on top of the Premier Support offering. Partners can tap into this unique global support organisation by reselling these services. Oracle has simplified the transaction process by moving more services to the partner portal, as well as offering pre-approved discounts.

The figure below summarises the ACS Resell Portfolio for Partners, which will expand and evolve in close alignment with the changes in the overall ACS portfolio as well as with feedback received from partners.

The bottom line

All in all, Oracle Support is the catalyst for the growth of your bottom line. From a customer perspective, the support organization allows a highly customised and specifically tailored offering to be built for mission critical services. From a partner perspective, there is good potential to make margins through value-added services as well as the servicing offering from Oracle. The key for partners is to align with the Oracle organisation.

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Oracle, Partners and Customers: engineered to work ethically together By Julia Windemuth

“If you think compliance is expensive, try non-compliance.” Paul McNulty, Former US Deputy Attorney General

In this panel discussion, we will explore why compliance matters to you, with an emphasis on local laws, recent enforcement actions and trends, including the importance of sound codes of conduct and business practices, detection and remediation mechanisms, and what we expect of our business partners.

The US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA), which has been the law since 1977, is being enforced today with unmatched zeal. The FCPA was enacted following reports that US businesses were making scandalously large payments to foreign officials to obtain business. In 1998, the law was amended, among other things to dramatically expand its jurisdiction. Today, it has a very long arm indeed. Companies registered on a US exchange or doing business in the US can be liable not just for the conduct of US personnel, but for the conduct of all their officers, directors, employees and agents anywhere in the world.

We will discuss the impact of this on the Africa and Middle East region, particularly in light of recent cases that demonstrate an expanded application of geographic and personal jurisdiction.

Anti-bribery laws are becoming more widespread worldwide. All 34 member states of the OECD, together with four non-member countries, have agreed to adopt measures criminalising bribery of foreign officials. Countries in Africa have also adopted anti-corruption and bribery laws. We look at what this means for you. The UK Bribery Act (effective July 1, 2011) is among the first such laws to criminalise bribery, not just of foreign government officials, but also of officers and employees of private-sector companies. Liability under this legislation will attach to a company no matter where in the world an offence is committed, so long as the company carries on any part of its business in the UK.

We will also discuss Oracle’s Partner Code of Conduct, an essential guide for ethical behaviour. The Partner Code of Conduct and Business Ethics is applicable to all Oracle Partners, resellers and personnel employed by or engaged to provide services to Partners and resellers throughout the world.

Business compliance and ethics – why it matters to you

Anti-corruption is not just a US or UK legal issue but also a global issue that affects each one of us directly. Oracle’s employees and Partners are obligated to ensure that they comply with local laws in countries where they do business, and that their overall business conduct adheres to the standards and expectations outlined in their agreements with Oracle.

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Oracle relies heavily upon its Partners to provide best-in-class solutions and services to its customers across the world, and therefore, expects that all of its Partners behave ethically. We take great efforts to ensure that all of our partners are the best in their countries and regions, and expect that Partners know and comply with the laws that are applicable to their businesses. Existing and recent legal developments worldwide compel all of us to act in an ethical and honest manner. However, this should not be something new to you as an Partner, bound by Oracle’s Partner Code of Conduct. It is important for you, as an Oracle Partner, to have a better understanding of your responsibilities as an Oracle Partner both directly when dealing with Oracle customers, and also indirectly when dealing with fellow partners.

It must be clear to everyone who represents Oracle in business – Oracle‘s anti-corruption policies do apply to you and this matters. Oracle can be held legally responsible, together with Partners, for unethical or corrupt conduct committed by any Partner employees .

This is an important dialogue and we look forward to hearing your perspective on the compliance challenges that you face in the local marketplace and why compliance matters for you.

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Speakers’ biographies

Janusz NaklickiVice President Alliance and Channels and General Business SalesOracle ECEMEA

Janusz Naklicki graduated from the University of Warsaw, Institute of Information Science. He earned an MBA studying at the University of Minnesota, Carlson School of Management (1994-96) with a scholarship from the Fulbright Commission. He completed executive courses on Negotiation and Competitive Decision Process at Harvard and Wharton.

He has been associated with the IT business since the end of the eighties. At Hewlett-Packard Poland he was Product Marketing Manager contributing to the success of HP printers and PCs. He worked for Sun Microsystems Poland starting as Product Marketing Manager for Middle Europe, then as Marketing and Channel Manager for Poland leveraging Suns rapid expansion in the Polish market. Naklicki has been working at Oracle since December 2001, initially as Marketing & Channel Director and currently as Vice President Technology General Business for the ECEMEA region strengthening company leadership in the professional business software market. Since March 2011 he has also been managing the Alliances and Channels Organization for ECEMEA

Gürhan KaleliogluVice PresidentOracle Central Asia, Turkey, Kenya, Nigeria, West & East Africa

Gürhan Kalelioglu was born in Ankara, Turkey in 1965. He graduated from Middle East Technical University, Department Of Business Administrations in 1988. He is fluent in English and French.

Gürhan Kalelioglu has 21 years of IT industry experience including his positions at NCR Turkey, NCR Dayton, NCR San Diego, Digital Ankara and Oracle.

Kalelioglu started to work at Oracle in 1995 as regional Manager-Ankara, then was appointed as the Country Leader at Oracle Turkey in 2008 and is now the Vice President of Oracle “Central Asia, Turkey, Kenya, Nigeria, West & East Africa” Region.

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Arun Khehar Vice President Application SalesOracle MEA

Arun Khehar is currently Oracle’s Vice President for Middle East & Africa Applications Business covering all Industries.

Arun Khehar studied Engineering in Sweden, followed by a Master’s Degree in International Business from University of Edinburgh - Scotland, in 2004.

Prior to taking over the role of VP Applications for Middle East & Africa, Arun Khehar played a pivotal role in establishing new businesses for Oracle (Business Intelligence & Datawarehousing, CRM, ERP, Industries specifically Retail, Automotive & Real Estate) and executing very successful sales and marketing strategies around Arun Khehar brings over 20 years of Information Technology industry experience to Oracle. Prior to joining Oracle, Arun Khehar worked with Apple Computers distributor and HP.

NAIROBI, KENYA


Bright SimonsPresidentmPedigree Network

Bright Simons pioneered a system that allows consumers to instantly check whether their medicines are counterfeits or not by sending a free text message. He is director of development research at IMANI, a member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Councils, Young Global Leaders, and Technology Pioneers Communities, a TED and Ashoka fellow and a Brain Trust member of the Evian Group at IMD.

He is a recipient of numerous awards, ranging from an Archbishop Desmond Tutu Award, Marie Curie and Commonwealth Vision Grants to a PPARC Scholarship in Gamma Ray Astronomy. Bright is consulted on innovation strategy by international organizations such as the World Bank, UNECA, USAID, and the Commonwealth; and is a member of the UN Secretary General’s taskforce on innovative models in healthcare. He is was a Fellow and a member of the faculty of the Salzburg Global Seminar Session 481, “Innovating for Value in Health Care Delivery: Better Cross-Border Learning, Smarter Adaptation and Adoption” in 2011. Bright is a also a member of the Advisory Council of IC Publications, one of the world’s leading publishers focused on Africa and the African Diaspora.

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NAIROBI, KENYA


Delia Meth-Cohn Managing DirectorGlobal Rethink

Delia frequently chairs and speaks at conferences around the world. She has moderated discussions with prime ministers in Russia, Spain, Turkey and Egypt, and other government leaders across Africa, the Middle East, Europe and Asia. She leads highly interactive but focused sessions around topics including technology, healthcare and innovation. She provides regular in-house briefings to senior executives at global companies, focusing especially on corporate strategy in emerging markets.

Delia also provides research, editing and content services to companies, think tanks and international organisations. She was Editorial Director of the Economist Intelligence Unit for Continental Europe, Middle East and Africa until 2013.

She has an MA in International Politics from Columbia University and a BA from Durham University. She lives in Vienna with her husband and two teenage children.

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Partner Speakers

Prabu BalasubramanyanExecutive DirectorTransSys

Pierre LamborayCo-Founder and Managing DirectorPopay Africa

Sankar NaraynanExecutive DirectorInLaks

Rafal DabrowskiRegional Partner Management DirectorOracle ECEMEA

Lynne GillonSenior Director, Partner Business DevelopmentOracle ECEMEA

Sarkis KerkezianCEP Transformation Program ManagerOracle MEA

Swaminathan NatarajanSenior Director, Fusion Applications Business DevelopmentOracle ECEMEA

Liam NolanSenior Director, Product Development and Product Management SaaSOracle WW

Mohammed OwaisSenior Director, Application PartnersOracle ECEMEA

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Oracle Speakers

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Oracle Speakers

Gilbert SaggiaCountry ManagerOracle Kenya

Sanjay SinhaVice President Platform ProductsOracle WW

Cherian VargheseSenior Sales DirectorOracle Transition Countries

Julia WindemuthSenior Director, Legal and Regional Compliance and Ethics OfficerOracle EMEA

Sedat ZencirciSales Consulting DirectorOracle Central Asia and Turkey

NAIROBI, KENYA


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