Oracle's Larry Ellison Pokes Amazon Again With New Cloud Pricing Plan (siliconangle.com)

Oracle went on the offensive again versus Amazon.com this week with a new cloud pricing plan that gives discounts to Oracle database customers who move their databases to the cloud. From a report: Chairman and Chief Technology Officer Larry Ellison said during an event at its Redwood City, California headquarters that while Oracle has matched Amazon Web Services for base-level computing, storage and networking services known as infrastructure as a service, it's now moving to make higher-level cloud services such as databases and analytics cheaper than AWS's. Actually, Ellison claimed that Oracle's infrastructure runs faster and therefore ends up costing less, but it's clear that the company is focusing more on its traditional strengths one tier up from the infrastructure: so-called platform as a service offerings such as the Oracle Database. Oracle said it will allow customers to move their existing licenses for databases, middleware and analytics to Oracle's platform services, just as they've allowed them to bring licenses to its infrastructure before.

Comments

Great. No thanks.

[Bearhouse]

No way I'd ever deal with those incompetent & crooked bastards ever again.
Ever.

If you're planning a big move, take advantage of it to move away from Oracle.

Re:Great. No thanks.

[Anonymous Coward]

Why doesn't the industry blackball this guy? How do people continue to give Oracle money?

Smart move

[OpenSourced]

Just get a lot of database licenses on the cloud, and then Oracle can raise the prices again. As Oracle is a master in the art of gouging the clients, they will design a complex update-upgrade-improve set of changes, new platforms and services, that will make very difficult to ever compare prices with what you were paying before (because now you are getting MOAH), or what other people are paying now.

It has the added advantage that Oracle can make arbitrarily difficult to return to your own metal if you are unsatisfied. I'm sure there is some subtle change in your license when you move to the cloud, or will be when some new "platform" is unveiled, that will hinder you when moving away. I'm also sure that the tools and support for moving to the cloud are far better than the tools and support for moving away from the cloud. If you thought that your organization was Oracle-dependent due to the quantity of code developed for the platform, just wait until you run on their servers. In due time, you won't be able to just get a full copy of all your data and metadata in a local computer.

Time to buy Oracle stock, I'd say.

Nope.

[Voyager529]

Dear Larry,

There are precisely zero people who use your product due to your business model. Your company has a decades-long history of costing customers huge amounts of money, either in licensing, legal fees, or both. Nobody looking to do a database migration is going to believe that the cost savings over AWS will last for any length of time; everybody, everywhere, ever sees right through the attempt to lock people in, yet again. Amazon, Microsoft, and OSS databases are your competition, and "We're not Oracle" is a selling point they will always possess. Even if by some miracle "Oracle is cheaper" was an argument anybody believed would remain true for any length of time, odds are good that most potential customers would be so wary of your business practices that paying more for Amazon is a better business decision.

The ability to continue increasing the cost for your current clients basically-indefinitely is the only reason your company is still in existence. Your decline will be slow, and will likely remain wealthy for the rest of your life, but when Oracle eventually goes under, your legacy will be such that there will be cheers and celebration for your demise.

Warm Regards,
Me

Re:Great. No thanks.

[tbuddy]

It's kind of a perceived strong choice in the corporate world and identifiable on a powerpoint slide as a bullet in the strength of the company being able to afford an Oracle solution. Had a friend who does HR talk about integrations for a couple companies tell me his Oracle horror stories and it sounds like absolute martyrdom for something that is terrible. I've never heard of Oracle having an "it just works" solution and usually the people who are good with Oracle in these companies are mediocre at best in terms of talent, but no one like to empty port-o-pots but they don't empty themselves.

Businesses don't run Oracle because they want to

[C3ntaur]

They run it because they have to. Didn't always used to be that way, but I've not seen significant technical innovation out of Oracle in a very, very long time. And given their other disasters with managed services, if I were running Oracle, I certainly wouldn't entrust it to their cloud service.

Re:Great. No thanks.

[Spinlock_1977]

I worked with Oracle 7 in the mid-1990's, and since then PostgreSQL, MySql, and SQL Server. In the 90's, SQL Server was making inroads into my company (Alcan Aluminum), but us 'old dogs' were fighting back, saying it wasn't ready for prime time. But since then, it has grown up and now I view them as pretty much interchangeable for straight-forward apps.

Back then, SQL Server's advantage was price. Oracle was $8k/cpu(on a small/mid Alpha-OpenVMS box), and SQL Server was much cheaper, but Windows-only. These days, OpenVMS has pretty much relegated itself to a niche, and SQL Server is about as expensive as Oracle for equivalent performance. So my vote, these days, goes to PostgreSQL, the only open-source database that is pretty much feature complete (for the day), and has been around for decades.