Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading!

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Oracle Businesses

Oracle Bullies Enterprise Clients Into Cloud Purchases, Consultant Claims 184

Posted by timothy from the oh-really-and-clearly-lies-everwhere dept.
An anonymous reader writes: A consultant claims that Oracle has adopted the widespread use of 'breach notices' this year to force existing enterprise customers to adopt its newly-bolstered range of cloud services, or else be told to stop using all Oracle software within thirty days. Speaking to Business Insider, the unnamed source described the tactic as a 'nuclear option' which is now practically the default when the need to add services or users to an existing contract triggers an 'audit' by Oracle. An ex-Oracle contract negotiator who now works in the ever-expanding business niche of 'Oracle contract negotiation' commented 'Internally, the water cooler gossip there is that they've never seen this kind of aggression before. Oracle has really dialed it up. Customers are buying cloud services to make the Oracle issue go away, not because they have any intention of using cloud services.'
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Oracle Bullies Enterprise Clients Into Cloud Purchases, Consultant Claims More

Oracle Bullies Enterprise Clients Into Cloud Purchases, Consultant Claims

Comments Filter:

  • How much you got? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by pigiron ( 104729 ) on Sunday July 12, 2015 @05:48AM (#50092215) Homepage
    After dealing with Oracle for over thirty years I've learned that the answer to the question "how much does Oracle cost?" is "how much money do you have?"

    • Re:How much you got? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Dutch Gun ( 899105 ) on Sunday July 12, 2015 @06:02AM (#50092249)

      Seems like a desperation move for a company with under-target earnings [businessinsider.com], if they're willing to poison long-term relationships with their customers like that. You're going to see businesses deciding that they don't like having a gun held to their head. They'll pay the ransom for now, but some of them will probably start investigating other options in the background.

      • Re:How much you got? (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 12, 2015 @06:54AM (#50092359)

        This is just what happened at my previous job. The ever increasing cost and pure hostility against customers made the company start switching from Oracle to other alternatives.

        • This is just what happened at my previous job. The ever increasing cost and pure hostility against customers made the company start switching from Oracle to other alternatives.

          Ditto. Our edict last year was "get off Oracle by the end of the fiscal year". The priority from the CEO was published and restated every month: #1, keep the existing service running, #2, get off Oracle.

          Every sprint planning meeting at every team began by restating that goal. Do only minimum bug fixes necessary to keep the system running, all other tasks must be toward getting us off Oracle before the end of the fiscal year. Existing features could be reduced if that helped get us off Oracle quicker or

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by gweihir ( 88907 )

        Businesses have already decided to drop Oracle if possible. I know of some very large companies that plan a migration to Linux in the infrastructure mainly to get rid of Solaris and thereby of Oracle because of under-performance and overpricing.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by jedidiah ( 1196 )

          Migrating to Linux does not address the Oracle issue.

          Linux is the reference platform for Oracle.

          It's an entirely orthogonal issue: OS vs RDBMS.

          • Linux is the reference platform for Oracle.

            Not true at all. Solaris is the reference platform for Oracle. They own the whole thing, hardware and software. When you buy Oracle on Solaris you are getting the ultimate "reference" platform for all things Oracle.

            Linux CANNOT be a "reference" platform for Oracle, because they don't control it, they can't mold it to fit their needs. However they can do whatever they want with Solaris, to make it into their "reference" platform.

            • Oracle's own linux distro is the reference platform. Solaris is dead and Oracle knows it.

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by gweihir ( 88907 )

                As can be seen by the lack of updates and development effort to fix, e.g., the parts of the network stack that are still abysmally slow (e.g. local sockets).

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by gweihir ( 88907 )

            Rather obviously, I was not referring to Oracle DB, but Oracle Solaris. And, again rather obviously, the migration is _not_ to Oracle Linux.

    • Re: How much you got? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by __aajwxe560 ( 779189 ) on Sunday July 12, 2015 @07:28AM (#50092431)
      I'll go a step further - a few years ago, was looking to add SSO to web product for our customers, and as an existing Oracle customer, they had a package offering for SSO from acquisitions. After agreeing to pay for some base consulting to get preview going, quickly realized what a pile of overcomplicated shit it was at the time (the consultants flown in from all over the place couldn't get the base "hello world" even working, and they all claimed to do this all day long and not unusual challenge). I saw if they couldn't get going, didn't want the ongoing support nightmare, pulled the plug and went with something much simpler. Oracle sales guy laughed, said he already added the skus to our upcoming databse support renewal, and magically, if I tried to take them off, we would loose "bundle" pricing and costs would go way up for just our existing db licensing (ignoring the fact that they were effectively charging us 30% more regardless for no new actual software). One example of many. Oracle is the one company that can fuck off harder than Microsoft for their shitty biz tactics. They shoot themselves in the foot in big picture - any new companies u am at, I steer to anything but Oracle.
      • I ahd virtually the same experience with Computer Associates back in the mid-to-late 90s. They were another "buy a user base and extort 'em, then discontinue the product and [force] re-sell 'em the replacement" kind of company.

        It's just like Microsoft. Most people assume they're a computer company, but they're really a marketing company. Google is advertising, not search. Meanwhile, Oracle (and CA) aren't really technology companies, but sales organizations.

      • Re: How much you got? (Score:2, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward

        You need to know how Oracle sales work to fully make sense of what just happened. Oracle pushes its sales force to position products that are strategic to its earnings report and not the product that could best solve the problem at hand... In past few years, it was the era of Engineered Systems (Exadata).. What customer needed was just a bunch of cheap x86 servers and some Oracle DB licenses, but more often than not, the overall cost offered by the Oracle sales person would be the same with or without Exad

        • I have myself seen customers holding multiple Exadata units in their docking area, and never even open the package, although on paper, each unit costed several hundred thousand dollars!

          Dang! Any chance you could get me a nice offer on those?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Greyfox ( 87712 )
      Funny thing is I've never seen a client that actually needed the power Oracle or DB2 brings to the table. Most of them don't need anything more complex than glorified key/value storage and some standards on where files shall be located. If you're a bank and need to store tens of millions of actually organized data, yeah, go for the big database. If you're a small business and need to store the company's shopping list for the next couple months, something as powerful as Postgres is probably overkill for you.

      • But support. If you are a medium business you need support... Because your IT department is no where near big enough for super detailed debugging when production is stopped and bills aren't being mailed out. My $200k support contract buys me a person on the line that will stay till the problem is fixed most of the time. The smaller players just can't do that reliably.

        • Nearly every OS database has support options from either the very people who built them or other excellent companies. Plus if you run into a "support" issue you have probably run into a bug. Oracle isn't going to patch a bug for some chain of corner stores. They are also not going to hire "best of breed" developers who can fix things. They are going to have IT people who probably hate their jobs.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Greyfox ( 87712 )
          I hear the support argument a lot. Again, in my experience the amount of support anyone ever actually needs is significantly less than the price they pay to get that support. And sure, there is some risk in going with an unsupported product. That risk can typically be mitigated, too. Really, if your company needs constant hand-holding from a supplier for one of their products, that would be a red flag to me about the quality of that product or the quality of your employees. Or maybe both.

  • Headline from the future: (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Gravis Zero ( 934156 ) on Sunday July 12, 2015 @06:52AM (#50092353)

    The End of Oracle: Unhappy Customers Jumping Ship In Droves

    You can only be pushy for as long as you are irreplaceable.

  • We're ditching Oracle (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward

    I work for a company which develops online charging solutions currently in production on several telcos worldwide and although this is news for us, since last year we have been replacing all Oracle products with open-source software.
    The non-Oracle version is already running in the lab with at least the same performance level of the old one and we won't go back.

    • Oracle is only good for huge implementations. I see a lot of organizations that use Oracle but at a level were it isn't nessary.
      And many of the other product open source and closed commercial are actually quite good, and not like in the 1990's
      Where you had Oracle and crap systems that peaked at around 500,000 rows.
      oddly enough just as long as you don't have dumb ass vendors switching to an other database system isn't as hard as it seems. Just as long as you don't make the mistake and become a "vendor" sho

      • Re:We're ditching Oracle (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Shados ( 741919 ) on Sunday July 12, 2015 @10:35AM (#50092891)

        And this is where things are getting dicey for Oracle. Even an open source DB can deal with billions of rows. And when you go beyond that, people start using multiple interconnected specialized systems instead: a big mismatch of a relational db, hadoop, redshift, dynamo, vertica, spark, etc.

        If you need a trillion records in one table, there's better commercial options than Oracle. If you can need specialized tool to handle different data sets of various size, you'll be using a soup of tools, most of which are open source.

        There's no reason to use Oracle stuff anymore, aside for legacy compatibility, or if you use their ERP (which for large Retail, is probably the best one, unfortunately)

        • Even an open source DB can deal with billions of rows.

          bzzzt wrong, you clearly haven't set up enterprise databases on 64 core systems with hundreds of gigs of RAM and big disk farms. All of the "free" databases will treat this like an 8 core system at best, a terrible waste of money. Try running really big benchmarks against databases like DB2 and you can watch the "free" databases will end up costing more.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Shados ( 741919 )

            You also do not need 64 cores on each machine to deal with billions of rows.

            disclaimer: the company I work for runs a little over a trillion (a trillion as in a thousand billion) records in _ONE_ table, which is also our most used one. That doesn't count the hundreds of other tables.

            Yes, the primary source of that data is a commercial database (vertica). Its also not an RDBMS (doing the kind of stuff we do even on an Oracle DB would be absurd). But we do use open postgresql and other open source non-relat

            • You also do not need 64 cores on each machine to deal with billions of rows.

              you do if you have 10,000 concurrent users

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by Shados ( 741919 )

                10000 isn't even that much. My previous employer ran 100~ billion record tables on a 100 million user a year, about 20-30k concurrent at all time, thousand transactions a minute, on freagin MSSQL on 16 core machines.

                The only thing that happens is you have to be really careful with your database design, partitioning, etc. My wife works for freagin Amazon, and they don't have that much trouble getting their e-commerce site working. I never asked, but I'd be very surprised if they ran their backend on Oracle

            • You also do not need 64 cores on each machine to deal with billions of rows.

              modern databases have parallelization, well-indexed queries can utilize hundreds of cores

  • ORACLE is (Score:4, Informative)

    by wbr1 ( 2538558 ) on Sunday July 12, 2015 @07:17AM (#50092407)
    One Raging Asshole Called Larry Ellison

  • Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Sunday July 12, 2015 @07:24AM (#50092419)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Apps (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      You ( and so many others ) forget oracle is NOT just a database company. They also sell enterprise apps, and dev tools that lock you into their DB since that is the ONLY thing the final app will work with ( Apex for example ).. Once you get on the train it's really hard to get off, especially financially. ( actual hard cost of the change, then the soft cost of starting over ... )

      Are there alternatives to everything? Sure, but it's not just a simple 'lets move our data somewhere else' and you have to addre

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by lucm ( 889690 )

      Virtually every database I've ever seen is a bit bucket. There's precisely zero reasons for them to be on Oracle because the data set is well into the size where PostgreSQL, MySQL and SQL Server could easily provide a more cost-effective alternative.

      That's fine for in-house stuff. The problem is when the organization buys an ERP or accounting package that requires Oracle. Maybe it could technically run on MySQL, but the vendor doesn't support that.

      Usually the only other supported database is SQL Server, but this means having Windows servers, and for an organization that has made a substantial investment in big AIX or HPUX, it's a show stopper.

      Red Hat has done a terrific job of making Linux enterprise-friendly. It's common nowadays to have organizations

    • Oracle does much more than databases. They make software businesses use, and when a competitor gets too strong, they buy them, hostilely if necessary [cnn.com]. Oracle is good at making sure there are no alternatives too their software.

  • Oracle is being Oracle, claim people who can't do anything without Oracle.

  • Comment removed (Score:3)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Sunday July 12, 2015 @09:06AM (#50092629)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Adobe is also pushing users toward their vision of the cloud. I have an IT client who needed to use InDesign for a publishing project. It seems like a ripoff to have to subscribe by the month for cloud software, but it was a cost she was willing to bear and at least there's a lessened degree of platform dependence, right? So she signed up, only to discover that the cloud version will not run on Windows Vista. Adobe still sells the direct-install Version 6, but Vista was supported only up through 5.5 . Adobe

    • While hardly an Adobe apologist, you have a client that is running an OS that the OS vendor barely supports and you want an application vendor to tailor it's policies to your edge case? For software that there are other alternatives [onextrapixel.com] for?

      Be reasonable. And, if your client is a 'real' business, suggesting that they torrent something is pretty dodgy. It could well end up costing them much more than an upgrade to a newer OS.

      • "you want an application vendor to tailor it's policies to your edge case?"

        Exactly. I'm not asking Adobe to invest manpower into keeping an old version updated, but just to continue selling a version it has already developed. At the very least, allow third parties to sell it. Pure profit, and they are passing it up.

  • I ask the question why does anyone use oracle in this day and age? I am not asking for a whitepaper or some PR generated sales points but a real answer from real technical people who have a broad experience with multiple databases. I think that it is mighty telling that none of the mega data companies use Oracle; the facebooks, the googles, the reddits, the slashdots. Basically if their data needs are met by the likes of MySQL, redis, postgres, etc then what company or organization can claim that they need

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jedidiah ( 1196 )

      Anyone that actually cares about their data uses Oracle or something like it. Droning on about raw speed that's probably achieved with a dubious configuration really isn't relevant to people that have serious work to do that can't be interrupted.

      If you think that MySQL is a drop in replacement for any Oracle database then you're probably missing the point entirely.

  • I am curious here.. What does Oracle do well? Like.. where is the Oracle software better than all the alternatives? All of my experiences with Oracle seem to be that they have old legacy software with a user base too scared to move to something modern. Oracle's business model: 1. identify software with entrenched user base 2. buy said software 3. continue to 'support' software with new versions that consist of mostly a new splash screen on startup 4. raise prices

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by pigiron ( 104729 )
      High volume ACID transactions and stored procedures.

    • What does Oracle do well?

      Sales and Marketing.

      • What does Oracle do well?

        Sales and Marketing.

        Really? They have TERRIBLE marketing. Just about every article you read about them (like this one) is negative. Marketing is about creating a positive attitude in the mind your customers. Oracle does this worse than just about any other company, they're up there with Verizon and Comcast.

        What you don't seem to understand is, just like Verizon and Comcast, that they have something nobody else has, they know it, their customers know it, and the customers pay. Bullies, one and all, with none to push back.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Shados ( 741919 )

      Oracle's enterprise stack is pretty strong in certain fields. Their ERP is top notch in brick and mortar retail for example (better than SAP). And once you go down that road, its Oracle stack the whole way.

      Beyond that, if you're trying to scale an old school relational database to crazy scales, Oracle leaves everything else in the dust. For horizontal scaling, nothing else comes close.

      The thing is, if you're trying to do that, you're very likely doing it wrong. For insane amount of data, other commercial so

      • Beyond that, if you're trying to scale an old school relational database to crazy scales, Oracle leaves everything else in the dust. For horizontal scaling, nothing else comes close.

        Sorry, I don't believe you, DB2 scales out even better than Oracle.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Shados ( 741919 )

          My experience with DB2 was mainly in large finance (Goldman and Morgan Stanley), and while they have very large datasets compared to most of the industry, they don't push these things as nearly as far as others. That said, I mainly saw DB2 scaling well for data warehousing purpose, not raw transnational loads. There's a significant difference between the two. DB2 did really well when you just dumped loads of data on it and then did reporting. But constant transactions like you would in a retail/brick and mo

  • Workday learned their lesson... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by erp_consultant ( 2614861 ) on Sunday July 12, 2015 @01:34PM (#50093625)

    All of the Workday executives are former PeopleSoft executives. PeopleSoft (now owned by Oracle after a nasty takeover battle) is a great product but it has a fatal flaw - nearly all of the critical components are controlled by someone else. Database (either Oracle, SQLServer or DB2) is owned by someone else. Middleware (WebLogic) is owned by someone else. Reporting (SQR and Crystal Reports) is owned by someone else. Hardware is owned by someone else. Operating systems are owned by someone else.

    Workday, starting with a clean slate, decided that they wanted to control everything. So they used an object oriented open source database. They own and control every layer of the software stack. They, since it is cloud based, control the hardware.

    This gives Workday a big advantage when it comes to supporting the software. There is only one configuration to support. Oracle and SAP and others have hundreds of combinations of database, hardware, operating system, etc. to support.

    Oracle has typically been able to use its stranglehold on the database platform to force customers do this or that. But they can't do this to Workday or its customers. And this has Oracle scared shitless.

    Oracle is rushing to get cloud based products to the market. I don't know that Oracle is trying to strong arm their customers into using those new products but it is not without precedent.

    What I do know is that internally they have this philosophy known as TOTO (Turn Off The Oxygen). That is how they destroy their competition. Their hope is to TOTO on Workday until they run out of money and fold. They know that Workday is operating at a loss and that their stock is trading at insane P/E levels (2650 as of Fridays close). Oracle will give away their cloud offerings if they have to. It's a waiting game and Oracle has the cash to wait it out.

    • I support Workday and hope they give strong competition to Oracle, but

      Workday, starting with a clean slate, decided that they wanted to control everything. So they used an object oriented open source database.

      Switching to an "object oriented database" doesn't seem like the right direction to go for......anything.

      • Well, I believe the reasons were two fold. One was to escape the clutches of Oracle (and IBM and Microsoft for that matter). The second reason was to create a system that was highly configurable. Workday does not come with any native capability to customize the application. This is in contrast to Oracle and SAP, which do allow you to add your own bolt on customizations to the delivered code line.

        I believe there are now ways to customize Workday via third party extensions but not directly. Workday believes t

        • SQL queries on well indexed tables will have much better performance than any kind of object database in the vast majority of circumstances.

          If you have a large busy site with performance requirements, you will probably have a tough time meeting your requirements with an object database.

          • I agree with you but have you seen Workday? It's pretty slick. From the demos I have seen speed is not an issue. I believe much of what they do is in memory so I'm sure that speeds things up.

            Full disclosure - I work on one of those "on premise" systems. We use SQL for everything. I'm not trying to sell anyone on Workday. It's a nice product but it certainly has its limitations.

            The point of the original post was to point out that Oracle has screwed over its own customers (not to mention partners and competit

  • Another scam Oracle pulling on enterprise level customers is forcing virtualized customers to buy its hardware platform, claiming that virtualization as done by the major players means all physical hardware in the cluster could potentially run Oracle so must be licensed.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Cederic ( 9623 )

      I think Oracle's virtualisation policy is driving customers away, and instead of fixing their stupid policy they're trying to push cloud instead.

      Larry might like playing with his boats in the bath, but on this one I think his ego is costing him.

      • Larry should consider what threatening to sue long time customers, intimidating long time customers, being disrespectful to long time customers, will get him.

Slashdot Top Deals

Love may laugh at locksmiths, but he has a profound respect for money bags. -- Sidney Paternoster, "The Folly of the Wise"

Close