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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.
Shakedown tactics like demanding payment for protection are straight out of the Mob's playbook.
What happened was that accountants and MBAs took over the running of their companies, and all they know is that the purpose of any and all companies is to maximise shareholder value.
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"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.
... and switch to? The only thing equal is MS SQL Server which is also expensive and could do the same shit Oracle did.
No MySQL and PostGreSQL are not options unless you serve web content and do simple database stuff. People who buy MS SQL Server and Oracle use their AI, financial, and advanced reporting tools. Business Intelligence APIs are HUGE right now and it is also possible it is not them but their other software they purchased is using Oracle as a requirement.
In the old days when software was made in house you could avoid these problems. But the MBA's love packaged software for savings RIGHT NOW and this is what you get.
http://saveie6.com/
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...
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.
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.
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.
The company I work for switched to "concur" by SAP for travel stuff. It's sort of like they decided to combine the worst bits of paper forms with the worst bits of computer based forms, then dizzle a fine layer of dog poo over the top.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
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!