4 ms·

Oracle is at that stage where they didn't invent or do anything right in the last 5 years but try to get money from lawsuits.

Thrillington 10y ago
Only 5 years? Seems like it's been longer than that
meddlepal 10y ago
From what I've been told by a contact in their database sales team is that there pipeline for on-premise licenses is drying up quickly but their SaaS business is doing well.
- derefr 10y ago
  That explains a lot about their recent behavior, e.g. dropping Solaris. If everyone is consuming their software over a network, it doesn't matter precisely what it's running on any more (so even if Oracle DBs could scale better on Solaris than on Linux or a BSD, a 1.3x SaaS shared-cluster size costs less than an OS development team.)
  - binarycrusader 10y ago
    They're not dropping Solaris. They're instead changing the release model: https://blogs.oracle.com/solaris/entry/oracle_solaris_moving_to_a https://blogs.oracle.com/solaris/entry/oracle_solaris_moving... Personally, I'd say this is similar to Microsoft's decisions around Windows 10.
    - jimnotgym 10y ago
      And that is what they call spin. Didn't they fire the people who write it?
      - binarycrusader 10y ago
        No, they did not. How do I know? Because I'm still working on Solaris almost nine years later along with many others. Same manager, same projects. Staffing levels in some areas was changed as was publicly announced. See also http://www.esteem.co.uk/news-events/oracle-solaris-whats-going http://www.esteem.co.uk/news-events/oracle-solaris-whats-goi... Disclaimer: these are my opinions and not those of my employer.
        jimnotgym 10y ago
        Sorry, it was reported that the job losses at Oracle were from the Solaris team. I read the memo from Oracle on Solaris 12 and was (and am) completely unconvinced by it, but maybe I am just cynical. I am still moving away from it as fast as I can convince the board to back me. Good luck on the Solaris team, some good things could come out of it (with some open source licensing). Oracle could do themselves some serious reputational favours by staying out of court.
- prokes 10y ago
  Just to add a little nuance - the difference is in flow vs stock of customers. Very few existing EBS customers are reimplementing in Cloud because of the time, cost, and loss of customizations. It doesn't make sense. New customers are being forced into Cloud by the Oracle sales team. The sales reps literally receive no compensation for on-prem (EBS) deals, and they must go through a lengthy approval process just to offer a prospect the on-prem solution. Thus everyone is being guided to Cloud, whether or not it is the right solution for the customer.
  - ethbro 10y ago
    > Very few existing EBS customers are reimplementing in Cloud because of the time, cost, and loss of customizations. Also, maybe Oracle's "lock your customers in and then extract as much profit as possible" history is guiding decisions? If there's a rearchitecture cost to migrate to cloud, then why would you do it with a company who already $&#@ed you over?
  - Spooky23 10y ago
    The exception is if they peddle a Sun hardware solution. They will be slobbering like a dog with a bone if you show any interest.
- sjwright 10y ago
  > pipeline for on-premise licenses Sorry for being a grammar nazi, but this one is a serious pet peeve. The singular of "premises" isn't "premise", it's "premises". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Premises https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Premises
  - meddlepal 10y ago
    I'm not sure that's correct. The pluralization is for licenses not on-premise. Either way "on-premises licenses" sounds weird so I'm likely to stick with "on-premise licenses" regardless. Sorry.
    - grzm 10y ago
      Premises (singular) is a location. He was on the premises. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/on%20premises https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/on%20premises Premise (singular) is a presupposition. The premise is that we can get this done in 3 weeks. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/premise https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/premise I agree, it sounds weird. I'd avoid it all together and use on-site. Edit to add: or, as uncle-comment (?) pointed out with the Wikipedia article, on-premises software is a thing. On-prem might be a good compromise, depending on your penchant for shortening like that.
    - WildUtah 10y ago
      Either way "on-premises licenses" sounds weird so I'm likely to stick with "on-premise licenses" regardless. Sorry. Downvoted for expressing contempt for the English language and common decency, but then failing to add in the obvious "irregardless."
  - csours 10y ago
    TIL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On-premises_software https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On-premises_software
  - DoofusOfDeath 10y ago
    Well, as a member of the post-WWII Stasi, I'd like to point out that English generally has no universally accepted authoritative form of the language to which you can persuasively appeal :)
- Maarten88 10y ago
  > ...pipeline for on-premise licenses is drying up quickly but their SaaS business is doing well... I hear they are desperately pushing new cloud offerings, but they are having lots of problems with customer retention, as their cloud technology is really not ready so they are actually just selling hosted versions of the existing products that lack any cost advantage.
  - toyg 10y ago
    > they are actually just selling hosted versions of the existing products Ha, if that were true, it wouldn't even be that bad. In the niche I work for, what they sell is not even as powerful as their existing on-premises product. Not that it matters: they simply won't sell or even develop new on-premises, so you either go to their crappy cloud services or you just migrate away. There are now entire companies based on "move your existing Oracle solutions to our product with the minimum fuss and enjoy real power, not a cut-down version of what you already had three years ago".
bogomipz 10y ago
This is actually not true. Their cloud offering is doing really well. There's some impressive figures here: http://realmoney.thestreet.com/articles/09/15/2016/oracles-cloud-business-doing-well-older-businesses-arent http://realmoney.thestreet.com/articles/09/15/2016/oracles-c...
- KirinDave 10y ago
  A more trickily written article you could not find. Oracle is busting their humps to get major ESC on their clouds but they've missed the chance on some of the really outlandishly big fish. Time will tell if they manage to met BofA or a similar ultrabig FI and that could be called a success, but short of that all they can do is pay folks to write wrongheaded quarterly analysis and say "gosh isn't this better than Amazon?" Which is totally absurd. Comically so. And from the perspective of actually using their tech, you're better off scooping a mug of old compost and dumping it in a sizzling pan of oil and letting the oil spatter burn you. It will be a more enjoyable experience.
- empath75 10y ago
  Growth rate is a nonsense metric. If you're starting from nothing and invest a shitload of money in sales you'll have an amazing growth rate. IBM and Oracle are both way behind azure, google and aws.
  - parthdesai 10y ago
    I have a friend who works at IBM he tells me that IBM uses Google cloud for some of their stuff. The irony when you are a cloud provider but use another service.
    - yellowapple 10y ago
      I mean, that in and of itself ain't really ironic. Lots of cloud providers out there just resell abstractions around / improvements upon other cloud providers. Cloud66 is one with which I'm familiar; their whole business model revolves around wrapping AWS with CloudFoundry-like deployment mechanisms specifically for Ruby codebases (and Docker containers, but I never interacted with them in that capacity).
claudiug 10y ago
they have graal, sulong, I also cloud is doing fine :)

Thrillington 10y ago

Only 5 years? Seems like it's been longer than that

meddlepal 10y ago

From what I've been told by a contact in their database sales team is that there pipeline for on-premise licenses is drying up quickly but their SaaS business is doing well.

derefr 10y ago
That explains a lot about their recent behavior, e.g. dropping Solaris. If everyone is consuming their software over a network, it doesn't matter precisely what it's running on any more (so even if Oracle DBs could scale better on Solaris than on Linux or a BSD, a 1.3x SaaS shared-cluster size costs less than an OS development team.)
- binarycrusader 10y ago
  They're not dropping Solaris. They're instead changing the release model: https://blogs.oracle.com/solaris/entry/oracle_solaris_moving_to_a https://blogs.oracle.com/solaris/entry/oracle_solaris_moving... Personally, I'd say this is similar to Microsoft's decisions around Windows 10.
  - jimnotgym 10y ago
    And that is what they call spin. Didn't they fire the people who write it?
    - binarycrusader 10y ago
      No, they did not. How do I know? Because I'm still working on Solaris almost nine years later along with many others. Same manager, same projects. Staffing levels in some areas was changed as was publicly announced. See also http://www.esteem.co.uk/news-events/oracle-solaris-whats-going http://www.esteem.co.uk/news-events/oracle-solaris-whats-goi... Disclaimer: these are my opinions and not those of my employer.
      - jimnotgym 10y ago
        Sorry, it was reported that the job losses at Oracle were from the Solaris team. I read the memo from Oracle on Solaris 12 and was (and am) completely unconvinced by it, but maybe I am just cynical. I am still moving away from it as fast as I can convince the board to back me. Good luck on the Solaris team, some good things could come out of it (with some open source licensing). Oracle could do themselves some serious reputational favours by staying out of court.
prokes 10y ago
Just to add a little nuance - the difference is in flow vs stock of customers. Very few existing EBS customers are reimplementing in Cloud because of the time, cost, and loss of customizations. It doesn't make sense. New customers are being forced into Cloud by the Oracle sales team. The sales reps literally receive no compensation for on-prem (EBS) deals, and they must go through a lengthy approval process just to offer a prospect the on-prem solution. Thus everyone is being guided to Cloud, whether or not it is the right solution for the customer.
- ethbro 10y ago
  > Very few existing EBS customers are reimplementing in Cloud because of the time, cost, and loss of customizations. Also, maybe Oracle's "lock your customers in and then extract as much profit as possible" history is guiding decisions? If there's a rearchitecture cost to migrate to cloud, then why would you do it with a company who already $&#@ed you over?
- Spooky23 10y ago
  The exception is if they peddle a Sun hardware solution. They will be slobbering like a dog with a bone if you show any interest.
sjwright 10y ago
> pipeline for on-premise licenses Sorry for being a grammar nazi, but this one is a serious pet peeve. The singular of "premises" isn't "premise", it's "premises". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Premises https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Premises
- meddlepal 10y ago
  I'm not sure that's correct. The pluralization is for licenses not on-premise. Either way "on-premises licenses" sounds weird so I'm likely to stick with "on-premise licenses" regardless. Sorry.
  - grzm 10y ago
    Premises (singular) is a location. He was on the premises. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/on%20premises https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/on%20premises Premise (singular) is a presupposition. The premise is that we can get this done in 3 weeks. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/premise https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/premise I agree, it sounds weird. I'd avoid it all together and use on-site. Edit to add: or, as uncle-comment (?) pointed out with the Wikipedia article, on-premises software is a thing. On-prem might be a good compromise, depending on your penchant for shortening like that.
  - WildUtah 10y ago
    Either way "on-premises licenses" sounds weird so I'm likely to stick with "on-premise licenses" regardless. Sorry. Downvoted for expressing contempt for the English language and common decency, but then failing to add in the obvious "irregardless."
- csours 10y ago
  TIL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On-premises_software https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On-premises_software
- DoofusOfDeath 10y ago
  Well, as a member of the post-WWII Stasi, I'd like to point out that English generally has no universally accepted authoritative form of the language to which you can persuasively appeal :)
Maarten88 10y ago
> ...pipeline for on-premise licenses is drying up quickly but their SaaS business is doing well... I hear they are desperately pushing new cloud offerings, but they are having lots of problems with customer retention, as their cloud technology is really not ready so they are actually just selling hosted versions of the existing products that lack any cost advantage.
- toyg 10y ago
  > they are actually just selling hosted versions of the existing products Ha, if that were true, it wouldn't even be that bad. In the niche I work for, what they sell is not even as powerful as their existing on-premises product. Not that it matters: they simply won't sell or even develop new on-premises, so you either go to their crappy cloud services or you just migrate away. There are now entire companies based on "move your existing Oracle solutions to our product with the minimum fuss and enjoy real power, not a cut-down version of what you already had three years ago".

bogomipz 10y ago

This is actually not true. Their cloud offering is doing really well. There's some impressive figures here: http://realmoney.thestreet.com/articles/09/15/2016/oracles-cloud-business-doing-well-older-businesses-arent http://realmoney.thestreet.com/articles/09/15/2016/oracles-c...

KirinDave 10y ago
A more trickily written article you could not find. Oracle is busting their humps to get major ESC on their clouds but they've missed the chance on some of the really outlandishly big fish. Time will tell if they manage to met BofA or a similar ultrabig FI and that could be called a success, but short of that all they can do is pay folks to write wrongheaded quarterly analysis and say "gosh isn't this better than Amazon?" Which is totally absurd. Comically so. And from the perspective of actually using their tech, you're better off scooping a mug of old compost and dumping it in a sizzling pan of oil and letting the oil spatter burn you. It will be a more enjoyable experience.
empath75 10y ago
Growth rate is a nonsense metric. If you're starting from nothing and invest a shitload of money in sales you'll have an amazing growth rate. IBM and Oracle are both way behind azure, google and aws.
- parthdesai 10y ago
  I have a friend who works at IBM he tells me that IBM uses Google cloud for some of their stuff. The irony when you are a cloud provider but use another service.
  - yellowapple 10y ago
    I mean, that in and of itself ain't really ironic. Lots of cloud providers out there just resell abstractions around / improvements upon other cloud providers. Cloud66 is one with which I'm familiar; their whole business model revolves around wrapping AWS with CloudFoundry-like deployment mechanisms specifically for Ruby codebases (and Docker containers, but I never interacted with them in that capacity).

claudiug 10y ago

they have graal, sulong, I also cloud is doing fine :)