Oracle Accused of Defrauding Investors On Cloud Sales Growth (bloomberg.com) 65
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.
Delphi (Score:2)
Guess they weren't oracles after all, at least regarding their stock performance.
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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 a
So, business as usual then (Score:5, Informative)
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"?
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It is. It's unethical as FUCK and now it's starting to bite them in the ass. Fuck Larry Ellison sideways with a bandsaw.
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40 years of continuously dickish anti-customer behavior. It doesn't seem they will ever run out of dumb sucker customers, so I am sure they will be OK.
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It's distressingly hard to avoid being an Oracle customer.
Ok, these days only a quarter of off the shelf business systems require Oracle, but lets say you use a different vendor for your HR system, for recruitment, in your call centre, for managing your IT service desk.. Next thing you know, Oracle have bought them, they're changing the licence terms and you're fucked.
About the only way to avoid them with any certainty is to stick with IBM and SAP, and lets face it, those aren't exactly cost effective alter
Re:So, business as usual then (Score:5, Interesting)
No, this is worse than their normal business practices.
What they are doing is cannibalising their traditional on-premisis installations, where the customer runs everything on their on servers and have their own local staff, and forcing their customers to be locked into their cloud offerings, using Oracle's servers and Oracle's staff.
Oracle are giving huge discounts to customers to migrate to their cloud, and they are also giving huge commissions to their VARs and partners to sell cloud licenses. The customer initially has a lower cost, as they have a discount for a specific period, but after that, they are hit with the full cost forever.
This kills off all on-premisis servers, operations. Companies no longer need their skilled technical staff, and trust Oracle to do everything for them. No different from normal complete IT outsourcing, except they are trusting a corporation that has been proven in court to lie, cheat and deceive. Oracle will screw over anyone, from it's own staff, to it's VARs and customers to make a buck.
What is going to happen in the longer term is that they will run out of customers using on-premisis systems, so their cloud growth will stop. The Oracle technical staff will migrate to other technologies as their Oracle related careers disappear. When new database related projects come up, there will be no internal staff recommending Oracle, but other alternatives, such as postgresql, etc. Oracle's market share will continue to decline.
All for chasing the short term growth in the cloud services, playing catch up with the big boys like Amazon.
My company is leaving Oracle (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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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.
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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
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Unfortunately there are no other choices besides Microsoft and Amazon's cloud DynoDB. Actually Amazon's Cloud DB might not be solid for conservatives enterprises yet. Microsoft while not as evil or aggressive as Oracle is not cheap nor always friendly either. Oracle has soo much financial reporting garbage tied to their products that Microsoft doesn't even have that will require new software rewrites.
What an ugly mess.
No geeks Mysql is not the same thing nor close so don't bother bringing that up as these l
Re:My company is leaving Oracle (Score:4, Insightful)
Unfortunately there are no other choices besides Microsoft and Amazon's cloud DynoDB.
There's your first mistake.
No geeks Mysql is not the same thing nor close...
The thought of using MySQL for anything even remotely important should be enough to get someone fired and/or prosecuted.
...so don't bother bringing that up as these large customers use financial and AI reporting tools and APIs and not just simple SQL statements.
What do you think these reporting tools are sending to the database, if not SQL?
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Most people here say just use MySQL and are dead serious without realizing what enterprise needs are. This is slashdot after all and free software is somehow always superior over proprietary. Anyway Oracles tools tie heavily into generated code all proprietary PSQL and PeopleSoft APIs and other Java code using again more proprietary Oracle calls. It really would be a complete rewrite to leave them which they took out of Microsoft's playbook.
There is a reason companies love their Microsoft Surface books whil
Re: My company is leaving Oracle (Score:1)
So other than arrogance what exactly is wrong with MySQL in your opinion?
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...what exactly is wrong with MySQL in your opinion?
MySQL's critical deficiencies are legion. The least of MySQL's major brain-damage revolves around silently accepting invalid data, then moving up to modifying data to fit column constraints (when the data should cause an error condition to be generated). The list goes on, but you can look those up yourself.
It didn't really surprise me that Oracle bought MySQL. Their thought process was something like, "We need a cheap, shitty database to complement our expensive, shitty database."
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No ACID compliance for one.
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This is slashdot after all and free software is somehow always superior over proprietary.
I know I didn't say so in my original posting, but PostgreSQL is massively superior to Oracle. MySQL, specifically, it even worse than Oracle, though.
Re:My company is leaving Oracle (Score:4, Funny)
Unfortunately there are no other choices besides Microsoft and Amazon's cloud DynoDB.
There's your first mistake.
No geeks Mysql is not the same thing nor close...
The thought of using MySQL for anything even remotely important should be enough to get someone fired and/or prosecuted.
...so don't bother bringing that up as these large customers use financial and AI reporting tools and APIs and not just simple SQL statements.
What do you think these reporting tools are sending to the database, if not SQL?
You’re bringing back nightmares. I remember dealing with MySQL back 1999 when the company I worked for tried to migrate to MySQL to save money. The horrors. Plus, MySQL is own by Oracle now. So it’s like going from the Oracle’s left pocket to Oracle’s smelly feet.
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The database is an irrelevance. Yes, it's fucking expensive, but it's not where Oracle are making their money.
It's the apps tier, and that's a fuck of a lot harder to migrate from. On the plus side, when you do migrate you can shift out of the Oracle database at the same time.
gambling (Score:4, Insightful)
Investing in the stock market is speculation
AKA gambling
don't complain when the house takes your money
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While I disagree with your sentiment (for long-term investors that is)...your analogy is also flawed:
Even casinos have to abide by the law
You'd be rightly pissed if the dealer was cheating against you
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You'd be rightly pissed if the dealer was cheating against you[.]
The casino IS cheating against you. The casino is allowed to collect and use analytics in their war against you; but you will get kicked out, banned, and even possibly arrested for doing the same thing.
Always go to the casino with the intention of walking through the door, emptying your wallet/purse into the trashcan, and then immediately turning and leaving.
While the store-your-data-on-someone-else's-servers craze hasn't yet gotten that bad, it's just a matter of time until it does.
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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 indexe
Wow. That is one generous pension fund. (Score:2)
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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.
Oracle is legacy incarnate (Score:2)
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
Why Should Investors Get Off Easy (Score:2)
First hand experience with Oracle extortion tactic (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Got audited, now leaving (Score:1)
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 o