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Oracle's Aggressive Sales Tactics Are Backfiring With Customers (lightreading.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: Oracle's aggressive sales tactics are turning off customers, setting a roadblock in the company's race to catch up with Amazon Web Services in the cloud, according to a report on The Information. [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source]. Oracle is threatening customers of its on-premises software with potentially expensive usage audits and strongly suggesting those customers could solve their problems by moving to the cloud, The Information says. But the tactic is backfiring. "Several big Oracle customers, including oil and gas exploration company Halliburton, toy maker Mattel and electricity provider Edison Southern California, have recently rejected big cloud services deals proposed by Oracle, according to an Oracle employee with knowledge of the situation," the publication reported. "Oracle representatives had suggested the customers strike the deals to avoid expensive audits of how they were using Oracle software, according to the employee. Instead, that approach to selling cloud is irritating customers," it added.
Oracle does this to government agencies all the time. It works quite well. All of them cave to demands to buy more licenses or face audits.
It's racketeering.
Oracle was always expensive as hell. They just were slightly cheaper than IBM's DB2 and didn't require an expensive IBM mainframe contract back in the 1980s. Larry's answer always was I had payroll to meet for my developers back then.
A company's goal is always to raise the shareprice forever with never an end in sight. The rest of the world is making money by selling to China in the past 20 years. Oracle unfortunately can't do this as Chinese do not pay for software so they need a new creative way to bump up the shareprice.
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In business school, they taught me to value the customer relationship over its lifetime. They also taught to think of all of the folks involved in the lifecycle of the product, including impacted non-customers, as important stakeholders. Oracle's approach has always been shortsighted, but it's painting with too broad a brush to treat all of the business educated as dollar chasing world breakers. Oracle's faults are Oracle's. Their shortsightedness is the result of *not* listening to sound advice, including that of MBAs.
Oracle has some pretty draconian tactics. I used to work for an Oracle EBS customer, and let me tell you, they are just like the mob. First, their fees are partially calculated by business revenue, which is absurd. Secondly, they failed to inform us of various software licenses on the technology side we would need to acquire which was only disclosed once we were partially through implementation. Turns out some ancillary oracle software we purchased wouldn't work without yet more oracle middleware to integrate back to the EBS suite.
Then, once they purchased Sun, the performance / processor license vs the cost of said licenses basically incentivized us to invest in slower, bulkier servers through absurd processor core multipliers which differ based on the kind of CPU you used.
Oracle sales are the mob, for sure!
Criticism of Microsoft
In business school, they taught me to value the customer relationship over its lifetime.
The value of the customer relationship is not fixed. Either you're not doing the lifetime cost assessment or you went to one of those crappy business schools that preach "the customer is always right". Screwing over a few customers for money at the expense of losing some of them may be a right business choice. ... Especially when you have vendor lockin on your side.