Oracle to channel: train on our stuff or else

Oracle has made a novel case for training your team in its wares: without coughing up, you’ll be so unproductive and insecure that your bottom line will wither.

The argument popped up on Oracle’s partner blog, where Kate Farrow, senior marketing manager for Oracle University EMEA looked at a survey from the American Society for Training and Development and concluded that “by not offering adequate training you essentially halve your employee productivity and knock a quarter off your company profits.”

Oracle’s post continued: “These impacts are likely to be much worse when we are talking about IT employees, most of whom work in critical roles.”

How much worse? A data breach worse, potentially, because Farrow argues that “trained IT workers make fewer on-the-job mistakes which could lead to a potential breach, but they will also have the knowledge to proactively safeguard your business using the latest technical and methodological security solutions.”

The post’s takeaways are that the time is now to get cloud training and to remember that Oracle partners get a discount when enrolling in Oracle University.

Which is nice. And cloud training is pretty important because cloud is new and may not easily be learned from peers or on the job.

But CRN is often told that even with partner discounts, vendor training is pricey. So pricey that keeping up the training required to certifications is hard enough, never mind taking other courses.

And let’s not forget that Universities now offer comprehensive free online courses on a study-for-free-pay-for-exams model through services like Coursera. And that rival cloud vendors do likewise: Google has 15 Coursera courses that touch on security; Palo Alto networks has another three.

So while there’s a big kernel of good sense in Oracle’s post, CRN expects that partners won’t imbibe it fully. And that won’t mean risking a data breach.