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.

Comments

When did software geeks become the Mob?

[JoeyRox]

Shakedown tactics like demanding payment for protection are straight out of the Mob's playbook.

Re:When did software geeks become the Mob?

[Billly Gates]

I am not a Gnu zealout by any sense of the means but being addicted to proprietary file formats is evil.

We all hate Microsoft for doing this but Oracle and IBM have been doing this long before MS rise and in my eyes is less evil than Oracle today. Microsoft at least gives you the bone if you go to Azure and Office 365 by including other features and tools vs buying a copy.

It is no different than ransomware once you are hooked. If your customer data or a MUST HAVE mission critical app has an Oracle dependency using proprietary PSQL your choices are to pay the ransom to Oracle, get sued, or shut your company down. Take your pick?

Halliburton probably figured it would be cheaper to fight in court then pay the ransom as they have lots of money and I would guess seat licenses that Oracle is drooling to charge.

Meanwhile IT costs keep going up even though technology should make them go down. They just lay us off and replace us with Indians and pay Larry Ellison the difference.

Re: When did software geeks become the Mob?

[StormReaver]

When they approched out business we switched to postgresql

I'll skip the details, but we, though our circumstances were not so dire, switched out all Oracle instances under our control to PostgreSQL because we got sick and tired of every aspect of Oracle's database (the software, the sales and marketing departments, the piss poor customer support, etc.).

Re:Oracle Auditing

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

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.

Re:Wake me when they switch DBs

[Anonymous Coward]

The thing is, you don't switch from Oracle (say, Exadata boxes) to something comparable as there is nothing directly comparable. What companies do is rethink their approach to BI, reporting and such and move to SaaS solutions, while simplifying greatly. The old days, where Fortune 500 companies would invest double digit millions in 1x and millions in ongoing spend in BI tools are gone.

I am an enterprise architect, worked for a few very large companies and currently am CIO-1 in a 50bn company. We ditched Oracle and moved serverless all the way, and are reaping double digit million savings. Not to mention we don't have to run this shit.

Oracle, in the meantime, is on a mission to push existing customers to their weird and overdue cloud thing. It started about 4 years ago, and their tactics started with stripping their own salesforece of commisions on on-prem solutions. Then price hikes. Now, I hear, auditing. (We've since cancelled all our licenses so luckily that's not one of my problems anymore).

As to why people stick and swear by Oracle - Exadata offers support for insanely bad queries and still manages to make a pretty good job running them. This is a good solutions for companies with incompetent, outsourced dev teams that don't mind paying for the licenses. But the number of such companies is going down and Oracle must see the writing on the wall - they are going the IBM way of being relegated to niche solutions, US gov't contracts and the like. And by looking at IBM numbers, it's not exactly a pleasant place to be.

Re:Not new..

[ngc5194]

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.