Oracle Bullies Enterprise Clients Into Cloud Purchases, Consultant Claims

An anonymous reader writes: A consultant claims that Oracle has adopted the widespread use of 'breach notices' this year to force existing enterprise customers to adopt its newly-bolstered range of cloud services, or else be told to stop using all Oracle software within thirty days. Speaking to Business Insider, the unnamed source described the tactic as a 'nuclear option' which is now practically the default when the need to add services or users to an existing contract triggers an 'audit' by Oracle. An ex-Oracle contract negotiator who now works in the ever-expanding business niche of 'Oracle contract negotiation' commented 'Internally, the water cooler gossip there is that they've never seen this kind of aggression before. Oracle has really dialed it up. Customers are buying cloud services to make the Oracle issue go away, not because they have any intention of using cloud services.'

Comments

How much you got?

[pigiron]

After dealing with Oracle for over thirty years I've learned that the answer to the question "how much does Oracle cost?" is "how much money do you have?"

Re: How much you got?

[Anonymous Coward]

Oracle is not particularly buggy. It's a stable and mature piece of software. However, it's extremely limited, always has been. Like Cobol, everything is limited so it puts real constraints on the solutions you build with it.

Choosing Oracle is not really about support or quality though, it's about CYA. See, the people who makes the decisions don't really know what they're doing, but nobody was fired for choosing IBM^H^H^HOracle, so it must be a good fit for your system, right?

Wrong. There are many alternatives and better tools for various problems: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=oracle+alternatives
Even some who provide enterprise support.

Anyways, SQL is really really old now, and is only chosen because people generally don't like to think for themselves and open themselves up for risk. Well, then you're also becoming a dinosaur who uses IT as a cost center instead of advancing your business with evolution of technology. As soon as top management openly admits that, everything is good, because then they're finally being honest at least. It won't help the business though until they become expert at managing IT services, which today is part of every fucking company.

Re: How much you got?

[__aajwxe560]

I'll go a step further - a few years ago, was looking to add SSO to web product for our customers, and as an existing Oracle customer, they had a package offering for SSO from acquisitions. After agreeing to pay for some base consulting to get preview going, quickly realized what a pile of overcomplicated shit it was at the time (the consultants flown in from all over the place couldn't get the base "hello world" even working, and they all claimed to do this all day long and not unusual challenge). I saw if they couldn't get going, didn't want the ongoing support nightmare, pulled the plug and went with something much simpler. Oracle sales guy laughed, said he already added the skus to our upcoming databse support renewal, and magically, if I tried to take them off, we would loose "bundle" pricing and costs would go way up for just our existing db licensing (ignoring the fact that they were effectively charging us 30% more regardless for no new actual software). One example of many. Oracle is the one company that can fuck off harder than Microsoft for their shitty biz tactics. They shoot themselves in the foot in big picture - any new companies u am at, I steer to anything but Oracle.