Slashdot Mirror
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"?
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
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.
Pension funds manage large sums of money - decent chunks go into indexes but they also have strong reasons to buy stocks.
For example, many funds are based on (i.e. need in order to meet their obligations) ~7% annualised returns. They should and would be in bonds (super 'low risk') if the returns there weren't so pathetic due to prolonged super-low interest rates - the 2008 recovery was made possible by screwing over savers (and in turn pension funds). They have been having to chase equities and indexes can't reliably return the 7%+ they need. Of course, they could lower their returns expectations but that would mean contributions need to increase or benefits need to be cut - neither of which goes down well and becomes a political problem with voters.
In short, they are damned if they do and damned if they don't
Companies did the offshoring. Some like Chevron still are while there is a big fight now back to in-source.
All the companies that did this last decade lost money, had outages, had terrible experiences, and couldn't integrate their processes into their own as they did things their own ways and was a separate entity.
You get what you pay for. After the CIO or CEO calls and gets someone in India asking if to restart his home PC or they loose $2,000,000 in outage to save $40,000 in salary they quickly reverse.
http://saveie6.com/
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.
Customers get the shaft regularly after all.
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.
This is not to say you cannot win some on outsourcing. You just need to do it right and the savings will not be as the comparison of hourly wages made by some silly MBA may suggest.
Outsourcing is a guaranteed way to save costs
That's utter total bollocks. Outsourcing is a guaranteed way to change the cost structure but it sure as shit isn't guaranteed to save any money.
Cloud operations, even if it is a "lift and shift" or a "forklift" approach to the cloud, recognizes instant cost savings
Again, total utter bollocks. Again, it's a change in the cost structure and it can actually offer a range of interesting options, but it does not save costs.
If you're running at such a low scale that you can't afford good admin, don't have your own data centre and want to leverage the cloud providers' expertise then the cloud can be a great option, but at any scale at all, cheaper alternatives exist.
No more CAPEX on obsolete hardware, data centers, permits. Just pay your OPEX bill, and enjoy the savings
Capex isn't a cost, it's an investment. Hence being capex. The cost is the depreciation and amortisation, and oddly enough, guess what the Opex charge from the cloud provider is covering.
it looks a LOT better on quarterly statements, versus having to do a charge-off in a quarter
What the fuck is a charge-off and why the fuck didn't you sack your CFO if he hasn't avoided one relating to IT equipement investment?
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
You're comparing cash outlay and not cost. Shit, you've even acknowledged the cost differential is not backing your argument.
You're also miserably missing a very key factor here: If people want to use cloud services, there are better and cheaper options than Oracle. For generic hosting Amazon and Microsoft offer significantly superior options, for business systems SAP have some nice options, Salesforce and ServiceNow dominate their markets and other providers are available.
Oracle are expensive and a fucking nightmare to do business with, so even if you do want to go cloud, they're still sensible to avoid.
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.