Slashdot Mirror
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.
Shakedown tactics like demanding payment for protection are straight out of the Mob's playbook.
"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,"
But are they irritated enough to bit the bullet, port their mission-critical processes to a non-Oracle database and kiss Oracle goodbye? (If not, they've knuckled under and are going to be locked in to Oracle's products and pricing forever - or at least until a later generation of their own management.)
If Oracle is already pressuring them to port to a different DB (their cloud product) they've got a golden opportunity. Yes it might be more effort to port to some other DB then Oracle's own "other DB". But much of the work to absorb any differences - the port, the testing, and the dual-DB cya period - will be the same in either case. So it's only an increment, rather than the whole price of a DB port, to go to a different DB.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Halliburton is regularly audited by the oil companies they work for and I assume they don't like the idea of having their sensitive information stored in a 3rd party database that is hard to audit.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
I received an email a couple of weeks ago detailing how we are going to migrate everything to SAP (so it might be worse, I wouldn't know).
Oh shit, now you're really fucked. I mean barbed-wire-wrapped-baseball-bat-in-the-ass fucked.
I have had more exposure to SAP installs/systems than I ever cared to, and in each and every case the whole thing was a tremendous clusterfuck from start to...well, I would say "finish", but a SAP project is never finished. NEVER. It's never completed and so the money flows steadily out the door like a river...forever.
Run like the wind, brother. Run and don't look back.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
This is similar to the question I've been asking: Are there any happy Oracle customers? My (limited) research suggests that the vast majority of Oracle customers have one of three characteristics: (1) They don't know any better, (2) They have more money than time/expertise for converting, (3) They're locked in.
Are there other reasons? Is there anyone who would choose to do a new implementation using Oracle these days? For all I know there may be a lot of people who would, but I've never knowingly met any of them.
Not sure how this news relates to China. But Oracle has a huge presence in China and earn a lot revenue from there. Don't get brainwashed by Western media.