FEATURE MID-MARKET

or decades, Oracle’ s reputation has been built on serving the world’ s largest enterprises. Its software powers global banks, governments, airlines, retailers and telecommunications giants, making the company synonymous with missioncritical enterprise technology. Yet beneath those headline accounts lies what Oracle increasingly sees as its most significant growth engine: the mid-market.

As organisations across the Middle East, Africa and emerging markets accelerate digital transformation, Oracle is reshaping both its go-to-market strategy and its cloud portfolio to serve a vastly broader customer base. At the centre of that strategy is a partner-first approach, one that seeks to combine Oracle’ s expanding cloud portfolio with the agility and local expertise of its channel ecosystem.

According to Cherian Varghese, Senior Vice President – Mid Market, EMEA, Oracle, the opportunity is far larger than many people realise.

Redefining the mid-market The term“ mid-market” often conjures images of small and medium-sized businesses. Oracle, however, defines the segment differently. Rather than using company size alone, Oracle segments markets based on customer behaviour, economic maturity, buying patterns and growth potential.

“ In the UAE, for example, we consider roughly the top 1,000 organisations as enterprise customers,” explained Varghese.“ Everything below that becomes mid-market, but within that segment there are more than 25,000 potential customers.”

That broad definition creates multiple routes into the market.

Traditional infrastructure and database customers remain an important focus, but Oracle is also targeting organisations through NetSuite, Fusion Applications, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure( OCI), hospitality solutions and retail point-of-sale platforms. Even the smallest retailer generating transactional data represents an opportunity to expand into cloud infrastructure, databases, analytics and enterprise applications.

The region’ s vibrant startup ecosystem is another significant opportunity. Many young companies begin with relatively modest technology requirements before scaling rapidly through venture capital investment and geographic expansion. Oracle believes those businesses represent tomorrow’ s enterprise customers.

Breadth versus depth Oracle’ s approach to the mid-market differs fundamentally from its enterprise business. Large enterprise teams focus on expanding relationships within a relatively small number of strategic accounts. Success is measured by how deeply Oracle’ s portfolio penetrates those organisations.

The mid-market operates differently.“ Our biggest focus is how many new logos we generate, how many new markets we enter and how many new customers we acquire,” said Varghese.

To support that objective, Oracle has split its mid-market organisation into dedicated“ hunter” teams responsible for acquiring new customers and“ farmer” teams focused on expanding existing relationships.

How Oracle is betting on partners, AI and cloud to unlock the mid-market opportunity.

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