Oracle Middle East, concluded its second round of Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN) Days recently with an awards ceremony, honoring a number of its partners for their business excellence, industry leadership and sales success. More than 700 Oracle partners registered to take part in the Middle East and Africa event.
Prizes for business excellence were awarded to Dubai-based Global Technology Services, State Informatics Limited from Mauritius and Royah in Saudi Arabia. Mercator, the Dubai-based IT division of the Emirates Group, received an award for industry excellence — Airlines and Airports. Mannai Trading from Qatar and Saudi Business Machines each had individual team members recognized as Oracle sales champions.
Oracle has also announced that it is offering free sales training for partners across Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA). A successful pilot has already trained over 500 partners across 15 countries in nine months. The program has been designed to ensure partners receive training at the same time as Oracle’s own sales force. The free training includes two main courses:
• Sales Opportunity & Management — A two-day workshop focusing on essential best practice techniques for the effective management of sales and pre-sales opportunities.
• Partner Induction Bootcamp — This induction course, which lasts on average three days, covers a useful range of core topics including full product overview and training; how to get the most out of the resources available through the Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN); how to work with Oracle; and sales opportunity and management foundation.
Additional training will become available later in 2005, including Presentation & Negotiation Skills and a Partner Induction Bootcamp Level 2 course which will focus on case studies and workshops.
In addition to the above corporate initiatives, Oracle ME has recently launched a regional initiative called Partner Implementation Bootcamp (E-Business suite and Technology), covering Pre-Sales and Implementation resources, designed to sharpen skills and keep local partners abreast on the latest releases and features of its products. The implementation bootcamps are complimentary to Oracle certified partners. Interested partners should contact [email protected].