NRI and Oracle execs highlight the new trend emerging from customers

Partners are no longer dealing with CTOs but CEOs and CFOs.

Customers that are coming to partners and vendors with issues are more focused on outcomes than a successful implementation, according to Oracle and NRI executives.

As customers have their sights set on more AI implementation, they want greater business value.

At the Oracle AI World in Sydney, CRN Australia sat down with Lalit Malik, group vice president, alliances and channels, APAC where he discussed why customers are more outcome driven.

“They're not looking for just a successful implementation, but they're looking for an outcome and ROI,” he said.

For instance, a customer may ask, “how can you increase my EBITDA by 2 percent?” or “how do can you save me my supply chain inventory management, say x million of dollars?”.

"Those are the outcomes that customers are asking for, which we have to rework the partners and us have to rework in terms of the outcome,” he said.

“The approach needs to be outcome driven, and not just successful ‘go live’ driven. I think that's one thing that's come up in our conversation with partners and as well as customers feedback to the partners.”

Malik said it is all about the mindset for partners.

“We are also keeping the mindset of an outcome when we are discussing [with partners] and we're putting together programs for our partners, whether it's enablement go-to-market, acceleration or even monetary incentive,” he said.

“We're just striving towards an outcome now.”

Salil Akolkar, senior director, alliances and channel sales ANZ at Oracle added that partners need to bring in the industry expertise.

“Our stakeholders have changed. It's not an IT project anymore,” he explained.

“The stakeholders and the outcomes are expected are by the business units because they are the ones who are sponsoring an outcome driven project, whether it's the CEO or the CFO, many of cases, boards are involved or the chief risk officer.

“This orientation is extremely important as we go along, and everyone has to match to that in terms of the value we bring to those respective stakeholders.”

Malik agreed noting that it’s no longer CTO, CIO, and IT officers that are making these IT decisions.

“It’s the business owner who's getting more involved in decision making, and hence the engagement needs to be deeper and broader at the customer level,” he said.

NRI executive general manager, enterprise solutions, D’Wayne Mitchell also discussed this trend with CRN Australia is also witnessing this trend within his own organisation.

Even Mitchell’s department of 60-odd people within NRI has a diverse range of hires, not just IT workers.

“The team that we've hired and brought on over the last three years, Adrian [Stage] mentioned, most of them have got IT, but they have mainly CPA, they're people with supply chain backgrounds,” he said.

Mitchell sees the benefit in hiring people with diverse backgrounds as that person asks the question, “how do we adopt the technology?”

“We've taken the different strategy, which is hire the business process people that will understand the business, and then educate them and train them up on how to use the technology, including AI,” he said.

Mitchell also noted the important role AI plays in their business.

“AI really helps us get more towards the business stakeholders,” he said.

“The evolution of the of our workforce is more having those conversations about how to achieve greater business value.”