FY10 is coming to a close and before we dive into FY11 we thought we would take a walk down memory lane and reminisce on some of our favorite Oracle PartnerNetwork activities.

June 2009 brought One Red Network to partners offering access to the same virtual kickoff environment used by Oracle employees. It was a new way to deliver valuable content to key stakeholders (and without the 100+ degree temperatures). Speaking of hot, Oracle also announced in June new licensing options for our ISV partners. This model enables an even broader community of ISVs to build, deploy and manage SaaS applications on the same platform.

While some people took the summer off, the OPN Program team was working away to deliver a brand new partner program - Oracle PartnerNetwork Specialized - at Oracle OpenWorld in October. Specialized. Recognized. Preferred. If you haven't gotten the message yet, we may need an emergency crew to pull you out from that rock you've been hiding under. But seriously, the announcement at the OPN Forum drew a big crowd and our FY11 event is shaping up to be just as exciting. OPN Specialized was announced in October and opened our doors for enrollment in December 2009. To mark our grand opening we held our first ever social webcast allowing partners from around the world to interact with us live throughout the day. We had a lot of great conversations and really enjoyed the chance to speak with so many of you.

After a short holiday break we were back at it - just a small announcement - Oracle's acquisition of Sun. In case you missed it, here is a short field report from Ted Bereswill, SVP North America Alliances & Channels on the partner events to support the announcement:

And while we're announcing things - did we mention that both Ted Bereswill and Judson Althoff were named Channel Chiefs by CRN? Not only do we have a couple of Channel Chiefs, but Oracle also won the Partner Program 5 Star Programs Award and took top honors at the CRN Channel Champion Awards for Financial Factors/Financial Performance in the category of Data and Information Management and the and Xchange Solution Provider event in March 2010. We actually caught up with Judson at this event for a quick recap of our participation:

But awards aside, let's not forget our main focus in FY10 and that is Specialization. In April we announced that we had over 35 Specializations available for partners and a plan to deliver even more in FY11.

We are just days away from the end of FY10 but hope you enjoyed our walk down memory lane. We are already planning lots of activity for our partners in FY11 starting with our Partner Kickoff event on June 29th. Join us to hear the vision and strategy for FY11 and interact with regional A&C leaders.

We look forward to talking with you then.

The OPN Communications Team