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As tech spending goes, Oracle is, well, a pretty good oracle of things to come. In the analyst world, Oracle is known as a bellwether, a company whose performance is indicative of general market trends. So when Oracle dumped a horrific fourth quarter earnings report, the analyst world immediately set to saying we’re in for another tech slowdown.

Perhaps, though, there’s something else at play. Perhaps what Oracle is experiencing is more a sign of shifting tech spending dynamics, which won’t be so bad for the vendor and solution provider communities.

First, this is what an Oracle miss looks like: The enterprise software giant reported $8.8 billion in revenue for the quarter ending Nov. 30. That’s up 2 percent over the same period in 2010. Not great growth, but certainly not stellar.

Here’s the problem: Wall Street analyst expected $9.2 billion – approximately $400 million more in sales – for the quarter. In trading circles, this was a big miss, and the Street has been punishing Oracle ever since. The stock is down 12 percent in the last six weeks, and its market cap has been trimmed by a massive $40 billion.

It’s not just Oracle going through an end-of-year slump. Other tech companies vested in the channel are seeing similar earnings pressure. Salesforce.com, VMware and SAP, among others, are seeing their sales and revenues come in under expectations.

Contributing to the sales slump are obviously some of the larger global economic pressures. European debt, slowing economies throughout Asia, currency exchange fluctuations and political uncertainty all play into the business psychology that affects spending. Oracle undoubtedly is a victim of some of these factors.

However, Oracle isn’t seeing IT budgets being cut. Rather, they’re watching proposed projects come under greater scrutiny and going through longer sales cycles. “All of a sudden the CEO had to approve it or something like that, where before it was all set,” Oracle CFO Safra Catz said. “Clearly, this quarter was not as we thought it would be, and we’ve been taking a look at the deals that really should have closed and that would have closed but for some sort of irregular environment.”

Analysts are jumping on the trend, believing the tech industry is heading into another low year. Channelnomics offers an alternative explanation: The tech industry is going through a transformation in which the value is no longer in the technology (software, hardware or services), but rather in the business value and delivered outcomes from technology investments.

Across the board, CEOs and business managers are getting involved in tech evaluations and decision-making. They don’t care about the speed of a processor, the storage capacity of a SAN system, the number of virtual machines a server can host, or even the latest features in a CRM application. They are unconcerned with the middleware functions that enable cloud development and management, and they could care less about how services – cloud and managed – work.

What line-of-business managers care about are business outcomes. They have little tolerance for risk, as making a mistake will hinder business operations and sales. They want systems that cut costs, enable sales, open new markets and expedite revenue performance. The essential questions they want answered have nothing to do with the technology, but rather the byproducts of that technology.

What’s worse for tech companies that don’t get this transformative shift is that business managers are willing to wait. They are in no hurry to book IT projects until they are satisfied they are getting not just what the IT department wants, but what their operations department needs. The longer sales cycles are a reflection of their patience and the time it’s taking for vendor and channel sales to adjust their proposals.

The coming year probably won’t be one of a tech slump, but a tech adjustment. The industry has talked about “solutions” that drive business for years, but never really internalized that concept to actual products. Instead, vendors and solution providers simply pushed products that may have contributed to business outcomes.

The time has finally come when the business outcome is more important that the discrete tech products and services. In 2012, vendors and solution providers who get that concept and incorporate that value into their sales pitch will win.

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