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Amazon's Move Off Oracle Caused Prime Day Outage in One of its Biggest Warehouses, Internal Report Says (cnbc.com)
Amazon is learning how hard it can be to move off of Oracle's database software. From a report: On Prime Day, while the e-retailer was dealing with a major website glitch that slowed sales, the company was also dealing with a technical problem in Ohio at one of its biggest warehouses, leading to thousands of delayed package deliveries, according to an internal report obtained by CNBC. The problem was in large part due to Amazon's migration from Oracle's database to its own technology, the documents show. The outage underscores the challenge Amazon faces as it looks to move completely off Oracle's database by 2020, and how difficult it is to re-create that level of reliability. It also shows that Oracle's database is more efficient in some aspects than Amazon's rival software, a point that Oracle will likely emphasize during this week's annual OpenWorld conference in San Francisco.
Between Java and their Enterprise platforms, if Oracle spent as much time listening and responding to their customers as they spent threatening them, they might be in a far better position today. Any major platform transition is going to have problems unless you're exceptionally lucky. There's just too many moving parts in Enterprise systems for humans to get everything right on the first try. Oracle won't tout all of the problems people have moving ONTO their software from a competitor, but that transition pain happens too.
Every year that goes by, it seems like Oracle is in a more tenuous position, despite their increased revenue. They've already lost the SME space -- I don't know of a single company anywhere in our client base, or within my sphere of influence, that still uses Oracle software. Organizations are bumping up against the limits of NetSuite -- the costs to integrate 3rd-party or industry-specific components, compared with other ERPs, are turning out to be more significant than expected. So we have clients and vendors migrating ERPs over time.
Oracle is becoming the Comcast of the software world. They treat everyone like crap, but were so deeply embedded that they were hard to dislodge. With every passing year, that is less true, and I think Oracle knows it. Unfortunately, they seem to be choosing to double-down on the "treat everyone like crap" strategy, rather than actually fixing the systemic problems that might eventually sink them...
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