Bigger problems here
Really, the VAR-versus-direct problems is not the biggest one for Oracle, it is their customers voting with their wallets and moving away from them due to ever more expensive support that is also quite crap.
We though Sun's support was pretty crap, but Oracle have managed to make that look quite good. It seems the whole point of their support is not to actually do anything useful, like debug a product, but simply to pass you from middle manager to middle manager until either the product you are using, or you, are retired through old age.
Also the dropping of x86 and so on really did not help, the message being "we only care about the big boys toys".