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Oracle Accused of Defrauding Investors On Cloud Sales Growth (bloomberg.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Oracle is named in a lawsuit alleging the company's executives lied to shareholders when they explained why cloud sales were growing. The investor leading the case, the City of Sunrise Firefighters' Pension Fund, claimed Oracle engaged in coercion and threats to sell its cloud-computing products, creating an unsustainable model that fell apart, according to the suit seeking class-action status and filed Friday in San Jose, California. The Florida-based firefighter pension fund and other investors lost money when Oracle's stock plummeted in March after reporting a disappointing earnings report and outlook, according to the lawsuit.
The suit claimed that Oracle's executives lied in forward-looking statements, which are never guaranteed, during earnings calls and at investor conferences in 2017 when they said customers were rapidly adopting their cloud-based products and cloud sales would accelerate. The firefighter pension, which manages about $143 million for 235 participants, alleged that Oracle used software license audits and weakened existing maintenance programs to compel customers to buy the cloud products.
The suit claimed that Oracle's executives lied in forward-looking statements, which are never guaranteed, during earnings calls and at investor conferences in 2017 when they said customers were rapidly adopting their cloud-based products and cloud sales would accelerate. The firefighter pension, which manages about $143 million for 235 participants, alleged that Oracle used software license audits and weakened existing maintenance programs to compel customers to buy the cloud products.
Guess they weren't oracles after all, at least regarding their stock performance.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
I mean... isn't that just Oracle's usual business practice? Not just for cloud products, but for whatever product they're trying to push when they perform an "audit"?
It's almost the beauty of migration to any public Cloud!
We have an Oracle DB for our ERP and our CRM, and we're currently actively investing in a fast-track program to switch database provider for that exact reason: Oracle have been auditing the living daylight out of us lately, asking for tons of extra cash, threatening to drag us to court, and being generally extremely aggressive over features and number of seats they seemed okay to provide as part of our original contract up to about a year ago.
All the other Oracle customers I know are in the same position: they got so tired of Oracle's shenanigans they're all leaving in droves despite the cost.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
I see you also posted anonymously.
The word "censorship" only applies when performed by a government on public speech. This is a private forum and the moderators here have every right in the world to pick and choose what they want to have displayed here.
Yes, wanting to remove a post that is egregiously racist, is tantamount to public book burning. That was sarcasm, in case anyone wasn't aware.
While I agree that speech that is close to the border of what is or isn't racist can be a tough call, in cases like the post in question there is really no question. Really it comes down to determining the intent of the person making the speech. Is it intended to defame, or incite anger or hatred towards a race or class of people? If the context of the speech makes that a clear yes, then the content should be removed.
The question is, do /you/ have difficulty making that determination for the post in question? Forget the whole "slippery slope" nonsense and generalities that people who like to post racist content hide behind. Do you have any difficulty parsing the clear intention of the poster in this instance?
Investing in the stock market is speculation
AKA gambling
don't complain when the house takes your money
Go well
And so Oracle kills the goose that lays the golden eggs.
Their own greed will destroy their (at this point) legacy business.
.. in prison too. what business do they have investing in tech stock? put it in an index fund, lower your fees, and stop abusing the public trust.
I don't have a pension fund (401K like most Americans here) so I can't compare this to anything I know, but I did the math and based on the numbers above, they have $608510 allocated per retiree. I would think that's amazingly generous for a pension fund. I can tell you based on numbers I've seen that less than 10% of 401K holders will ever reach that number or higher. I would also think that based on having so much money that the pension managers should probably know more than to invest in Oracle as a major component of their pension fund. If they don't, then they don't understand what they are doing. Oracle was a pretty poor investment between 2015 and 2017 where if you bought any before 2015 you basically didn't make any money at all. I can't speak to whether Oracle really lied or not, but it does seem on the surface that a pension fund management company placed a bad bet and they are looking for scapegoats.
There isn't any way for Oracle to lose here. Right now, earnings may be flat, but once there are signs of a recession, companies will do two things: Outsource/offshore and move to the cloud.
Outsourcing is a guaranteed way to save costs. Call Tata, Accenture, or some offshoring company, hand over the pink slips, and companies will be seeing a sizable savings, on the order of 75-90%. Yes, there is griping, but all customers complain. There is a reason why you always get that nasal Indian voice on the other end of the phone with large company tech support, and that is due to the gigantic cost savings.
Cloud operations, even if it is a "lift and shift" or a "forklift" approach to the cloud, recognizes instant cost savings. No more CAPEX on obsolete hardware, data centers, permits. Just pay your OPEX bill, and enjoy the savings, as it looks a LOT better on quarterly statements, versus having to do a charge-off in a quarter and have to report profit loss to your shareholders who are chomping at the bit for a lawsuit.
Oracle is in a damn good place when the recession hits. When companies are looking to cut costs, they rather pay a $1,000,000 bill monthly than a $10,000,000 bill in equipment which lasts five years, because that ten million makes that quarter look like crap to stockholders, even though it is a lot cheaper than the total cost ($60,000,000) of the cloud services. Plus, if something goes wrong, the cloud provider can be blamed, or it can be considered an occupational hazard, like S3 buckets set to public.
I hate to have to be the one to point it out, but it is a FLORIDA pension which is bringing suit. The place is not known for brains or responsibility. I blame the intense tropical sun.
The word "censorship" only applies when performed by a government on public speech.
And you are wrong.
"Censorship" is anyone in a position of authority preventing someone else from saying/displaying/presenting what they want.
Every TV network has a censorship division, and has since the beginning. This was not government mandated, and it was not the government staffing those offices. It was entirely the private companies making their own decisions.
The First Amendment is a law that restricts what the government may do to regulate speech/art/etc.
Free speech is a moral principle that societies are improved by allowing all opinions to be heard.
Deleting a post would not violate the First Amendment. It would still be censorship, and against free speech.
I can see some company sticking with Oracle because they think that it would cost more to make the switch to something healthier. But it makes no sense for any company to do cloud with Oracle in that it would be new developing going on; why create neo-legacy crap when you don't have to.
Maybe their strong arm tactics turned a few current customers over to cloud but in my world I where it is endless AWS this and Azure that, I never have heard a single peep about going Oracle.
This is just like when nobody could see a way around Microsoft's stranglehold on the PC OS which then became a non-story when Android and iOS ate the entire mobile landscape. Microsoft tried so very hard stay relevant in this new world. Now we have the exact same story. Everyone wondered how to break the Oracle stranglehold on the enterprise DB and suddenly cloud made it a non-story. Except in the Microsoft case many people still do use PCs to access so much of the internet. With Oracle I see a future HP-UX. Purified Legacy.
I'm now waiting for someone to send me a resume showing their legacy creds with Cobol, DB2, HP-UX, and then Oracle listed as obscure dead technologies they know.
"Really it comes down to determining the intent of the person making the speech."
If intent was easily determined, Exelcia would not have "needed" to clarify that certain of his/her post was satire. "Hate speech" and "hate crime" statutes are outrageously vague but based upon the same silly notion that, for example, while assault is bad it is worse if the assailant' s words during the assault are mean.
The ideas of first amendment to the US constitution were not part of the core twxt because most statesmen of the time thought restricting government from restricting the rights of assembly and expression was silly. "Of COURSE the government shouldn't do that. You don't have to write it down and agree to it."
Maybe Larry, Elon, and The Donald can share a cell at fuck me in the ass prison. And take turns getting fucked in the ass by the nigs, the nazis, and the beaners.
Customers get the shaft regularly after all.
They have been defrauding customers for a while.... Their iron is overpriced. They've pretty much run their own company into the ground all by themselves.
Hello my Indian friend. Nice ad!
The 1st Ammendment protects all speech (apart from yelling fire and direct threats) primarily to allow political speech. On a knitting forum I think it would be reasonable to censor people from talking about cars, even if it restricted their free speech.
Posting as an AC for obvious reasons.
Long time ago someone at a company I worked for made a decision to use Oracle DB. That was the most expensive mistake in the history of the company. Here is the most recent episode of extortion.
A couple of years ago one of our DB admins accidentally enabled Advanced Data Guard on all of our DB hosts. Oracle intentionally does not make it easy to discover when you enable features that you don't have licenses for. It was enabled for a few months and not used. We really did not use ADG and could prove it. We had to undergo an Oracle audit for an unrelated reason. The audit discovered these feature being enabled. In a reasonable world one would imagine that we would be asked to turn off the unnecessary feature and maybe pay something for it. But no. Oracle demanded that we licensed ADG for all our hosts. They did not care that we had no use for it. On top of that they forced us to buy they shitcloud. We ended up spending a lot of money buying useless ADG licenses and their good-for-nothing-cloud. And you know what, we never ever used it after we paid for it. We never even logged into their trashcloud. But the scumbags undoubtedly reported this racket as a legitimate sale.
If you ever end up on an uninhabited island and need to use a database to get back home and Oracle being the only vendor there offers you its DB for free, use flat files instead. These people are despicable scum. Crooks. Never ever touch anything with Oracle label on it. Yes, it includes Java and MySQL.
Don't take me wrong. Oracle DB, MySQL and Java are fine technologies. They are just owned by a company which is run by scum.
The word censorship does not refer only to government actions or else we would not talk about 'government censorship'.
Moving to the cloud may or may not save money. It depends on how your current server infrastructure is utilised and architects and how your business works. If you think it is an immediate saving whatever, then you should not be in charge of such decisions. In my current line of work, moving to the cloud at the current time would cost us more over the current CAPEX and OPEX, as server CPU and memory allocation is above 90%, 24-7, and the DC already exists. Maybe at some point this will change, but not currently.
If you have variable daily usage, or are looking to expand beyond your current DC, or want to use the tools that cloud providers give you to support instance templates and workflows that would be annoying to set up a local equivalent for, then yes, the cloud may well make sense. Or if you want to transform your business practices to match the above. But for some, cloud is NOT cost effective
I have a friend working at a major startup who has been actively migrating to Postgres. He said the latest versions have basically every transaction, rollback, clustering, etc feature that Oracle has, and with no mandatory licensing requirements. Support contracts are always an option, but audits and Oracle style BS are right on out.
He's a few steps away from automating away the majority of his maintenence jobs so his focus will be exclusively on new development (which he is considered essential for given the company's growth.)
Oracle is the mafia. They have been racketeering en extorting customers for a long long time. This business practice should be illegal and they should be fined into oblivion. I have witnessed first hand a forced audit resulting in a two year long lawsuit that nearly bankrupted the company I worked for. They had to go through this to defend themselves since Oracle claimed more money than the company could ever have payed. The claims turned out to be baseless and Oracle lost the lawsuit. The whole ordeal left several people burned out and almost bankrupted the company. Oracle just tried to extort us even though they knew it the claim was baseless and we could never pay it. The didn't care and went through with it anyway.
We were audited by oracle and luckily escaped without any financial penalties (our DBA had gone through an oracle audit before at another company and was fanatical, almost to the point of hysterics, to stick 100% to what we had licensed, and even had kept a few ‘in reserve’). The auditor, according to the cto, made a comment that essentially boiled down to “we’ll be back until we find something” and after that it was, “Drop what you’re doing and get everything off oracle now.” We have C++ apps, java apps, tons of pl/sql and all of it is being either modified or rewritten to be 100% free of oraclethere’s now a serious consideration to possible move away from java on the possibility that they turn that into an attack vector somehow (I know, openjdk and all that, but the cto’s stance is “if it has *anything* to do with oracle, we won’t use it”).
It is most likely the pension fund is for upper management, most of the bigger participants have a 1 to 2 million each, and a few peons having at less 100k.
You don't have a fund for only 235 people unless they are a very influential and rich enough to afford special attention. Otherwise they would get rolled up with everyone else into a general fund.