10 ms·

Oracle is set to repeat the trajectory of SCO. Their primary product (the Oracle DB engine) is being displaced by the NoSQL and things like Postgres. The "next

by diebir 10y ago

Oracle is set to repeat the trajectory of SCO. Their primary product (the Oracle DB engine) is being displaced by the NoSQL and things like Postgres. The "next generation" of developers equals SQL engines with "old and bad", and when forced, it ends up with Postgres anyway. Oracle used to survive in significant part by the support of the "database administrators" class. This layer of support is also becoming thinner and older. There's essentially no way forward for Oracle. They can use hostage tactics to squeeze money out of exiting customers for a few more years, but otherwise they are irrelevant in the tech landscape. Except for Java, that is. The current tech is powered by Linux and there isn't really anything as big as Java on Linux. Python has been pretty significant and Go is making inroads, but the default is all Java. It is going to be interesting to watch how this will play out.

gaius 10y ago
This layer of support is also becoming thinner and older. It's not about age(ism) it's that Oracle stabbed them in the back by pushing cloud over on-prem where these guys (and gals) were employed. Now Oracle's biggest supporters are re-skilling to Postgres et al and stopped recommending Oracle to their organisations...
- UseStrict 10y ago
  Agreed, we were stuck using Oracle at my job and it's an pain to maintain. Their cloud solutions are awful and on-premises suffered greatly. Their database engine might be solid, but everything around it was terrible. Things like PL/SQL being an unruly mess, even things like auto-incrementing columns were missing until the most recent release (12c R1). Coupled with insane licensing (arbitrarily changing the core factor for licensing) and auditing (soft limits, lots of hand-waving). It serves them right that they'd be losing out to Postgres.
- tluyben2 10y ago
  This is what is important to note; Oracle screwed their consulting partners as much as they could by pulling support and 'dev' in-house and simply taking over contracts of big clients. My previous company was hurt quite a lot when Oracle ate BEA. I still talk to clients from back then who miss our support and products as now Oracle is bleeding them dry providing crap. But it seemed like a good idea at the time I guess.
pjmlp 10y ago
Maybe for startups, on the enterprise space I am yet to see any customer move away from Oracle, SQL Server, DB2 and similar.
- BinaryIdiot 10y ago
  When I worked government contracting they had broad goals handed down which they must work toward without it being an explicit requirement. One of these goals? Get on top of an open source only stack for security, cost and future interoperability between other groups. I worked on several projects where they were originally using Oracle or MarkLogic and we transitioned them to Postgres or various other, open source tech. If the slow moving government is moving various projects away from Oracle, I would be shocked if some businesses weren't doing so as well. Now I don't know if moving away from proprietary is a trend or the more frequent than moving to them.
  - beastcoast 10y ago
    Amazon is in the middle of a top-down migration off of Oracle. despite owning AWS, there are still a huge number of dependencies still running on Oracle.
  - mastazi 10y ago
    If you are allowed to and comfortable with it, could you share which country was that? Over the years I have looked at government projects in Western Europe, SE Asia and Australia, Europeans seem to be the ones that care the most about open source, while at the other end of the spectrum SE Asian governments are interested in it just as much as it lets them save money (much less because of "free as in freedom"). Australia seems to me kind of a mixed bag, it boasts about using Drupal because it's open source but I know that some projects are based on proprietary technology. Please note that much of the information I gathered is second-hand and may be inaccurate.
    - bane 10y ago
      I can say from experience that in the U.S., the procurement people are definitely incentivized to look for solutions built on open standards and open source because of the ability for the government to have the option to not ever have to upgrade again, but to continue servicing this specific procurement (and this specific version) forever and ever and not be beholden to a specific vender or solution provider. I've even seen cases where one company will sell a solution into the government and lose the maintenance contract the next year to some entirely different company who underbid the original provider -- and there's minimal slowdown in technical execution because the entire stack is open to some degree. The government is starting to develop an allergy to vendor lock-in because of this.
bdcravens 10y ago
> Their primary product (the Oracle DB engine) is being displaced by the NoSQL and things like Postgres. Worth noting they own MySQL (via Sun acquisition)
- metachris 10y ago
  The developers moved to MariaDB, which is what everyone uses nowadays anyway rather than MySQL.
  - wcarron 10y ago
    Patently false. I barely hear any talk about MariaDB whereas I still consistently hear about MySQL. Please define "Everybody" in this context, because it sounds like you've conflated it with "I".
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    - Spivak 10y ago
      It's the same situation with SSL and TLS. If you ask for a MySQL database you have a good chance of getting MariaDB. Oracle's largest asset in this situation is the brand mindshare.
      - wcarron 10y ago
        What do you mean by "ask for a MySQL database"? If I were a client, I'd be rightfully pissed off if the developer I contracted gave me a completely different database than I requested in my stack. That's a complete breach of contract, if there was indeed MySQL on the spec sheet. Who are you working with that would flagrantly ignore the obvious differences between SQL and MariaDB? Personally, I've never seen MariaDB used in an instance where a simple MySQL db sufficed.
  - vosper 10y ago
    Facebook, YouTube and Google are still massive users of MySQL. And MySQL development is moving along (admittedly after not much for a few years). I doubt MariaDB really figures compared to MySQL in industry use, or new installs.
tlogan 10y ago
The problem is the following: problems that Oracle products are solving are very hard. On other hand, our SV startup culture is all about making some quick websites and get rich schemes. So the conclusion is: Oracle is here to stay.
- y_u_no_rust 10y ago
  Yeah I honestly don't see oracle going away anytime soon
- sb8244 10y ago
  What hard problems are they solving that can't be solved with OSS today (tech problems)? I've heard things about their business apps division (business problems) and I can't say I particularly believe in their future there versus smaller focused companies.
  - mattzito 10y ago
    So - I'm definitely not willing to go as far as the GP was with their statement, but Oracle's database technology is pretty amazing. I love postgres, Spark, NoSQL, etc. and think the progress they have made is amazing, but Oracle's database from a raw featureset is incredible. - Shared-something database clustering - true scale-out database clustering without writing sharding logic into your application, worrying about hot spots, or sacrificing significant performance due to overhead - query offload to storage for bulk reads - Flashback - someone wrote a bad update that might have messed with some data? You can tell the database to set your view of the database back to before that update to verify, and then decide if you want to move the whole database back, or just extract the records that were changed by that query - fine-grained permissioning - have a table with credit card numbers in it? Give everyone access to it, but the credit card numbers are all obfuscated - replication - block-level? statement-level? real-time? real-time with delay? Whatever you want. In fact, you can say "Hey, replicate this database to another datacenter, don't make it synchronous, but don't let it get more than 10 minutes out of sync" - also, btw, when you need to failover that database, if you're feeling really brave, oracle can do the whole thing for you automatically, because their database client will notify a watcher that a majority of them have lost the necessary access to the database, but can talk to the standby, and the watcher handles the failover I could go on and on. There's just so much intelligence in the Oracle database platform. Would I ever pay for it? No, it's better to build applications that don't need that level of sophistication. But if you're a big company who doesn't want to write software to be smart about data storage and recovery, Oracle does an amazing job at just guaranteeing your data won't go away. On the business apps side of things, I think their software is mostly terrible, but I also think that they do focus on problems that OSS typically has not. If you are a manufacturer of satellites, there is probably not an OSS ERP solution that will work for you. If you need to store 300,000 personnel records, there's probably not an OSS HCM solution for you. None of this means that they're not eventually doomed nor that they're not shitty, but it is very fair to say that their software deals with hard problems that OSS has not typically focused on.
yomly 10y ago
Don't forget Amazon Aurora, and Redshift. With the number of big name customers AWS, these products are the most scary to direct enterprise Oracle DB. Though the smaller and new tech giants of tomorrow will probably be running your Postgres and MySQLs as you mention
ehsankia 10y ago
Basically, instead of innovating, or as the hip kids nowadays say, "pivoting", they just want to make easy money with stupid copyright claims and harmful tactics. I find this strategy extremely toxic and malicious. Google may do a lot of stupid things, and people often make fun of their "don't be evil" motto, but let's be honest, the shit Oracle keeps pulling here over and over is the real definition of evil. It's purely for profit and doesn't help in anyway to advance technology or humankind.
- djeunneun 10y ago
  >don't be evil Like censoring news articles which portraited a certain presidential candidate in a negative light for cash and goodies promised behind doors? Yeah, it diesn't get more evil than that.
  - witty_username 10y ago
    Source?
- tempodox 10y ago
  Microsoft's move to build their own version of Java with C# proved rather smart in that light.
bbanyc 10y ago
I wouldn't count Oracle out just yet. They're still much bigger than SCO or its predecessors ever were. They're also under the same management that built the company up from nothing, whereas SCO was a new management team that took over Caldera and was trying to pivot them to the product they'd just bought from the former Santa Cruz Operation, had no idea what they were doing, and eventually settled on litigation as a business model. (SCO, amazingly, is still continuing its litigation, despite having no products, employees, or assets remaining. Oral arguments on probably-the-last-appeal are March 22 in Denver.)
coolgeek 10y ago
> The "next generation" of developers equals SQL engines with "old and bad" I think that what you mean is: - they don't understand the relational model - they don't understand the tradeoffs of ACID vs BASE - they never bothered to actually learn SQL - they *think* that they have "big data" Don't get me wrong - there are compelling use cases for, and decent products for, every class of non-relational database. But there's nothing out there that can handle the general use case like an RDBMS. Anybody who doesn't understand that isn't qualified to be making organization-wide decisions.
- WallWextra 10y ago
  They don't have to be right, they just have to exist in sufficient numbers.
- secstate 10y ago
  PostgresQL is an RDBMS and has increasingly been demonstrated as able to hold it's own against closed source rivals. I think the OPs tossing NOSQL in there was poor form, and I think "SQL engines" could be replaced with DBAs. The world still needs RDBMS and we desperately need people who understand them from an engineering perspective. But as an average app developer, I can scale my product to serve hundreds of thousands of people with really shitty DB architecture by simply throwing RAM at Postgres. That means Oracle corporate promises and hoards of query-optimizing DBAs are not the default for most fast (and even some moderately fast) moving startups anymore.
  - dreamcompiler 10y ago
    What can Oracle do that Postgres can't, then? Can Oracle function with less RAM than Postgres?
    - pjmlp 10y ago
      Does Postgres already support distributed transactions across cluster nodes?
    - reitanqild 10y ago
daniel_iversen 10y ago
You may not like Oracle, but I bet they'll be around, thriving for decades.. Sure the Oracle DB is being replaced somewhat by other technologies and a shifting market to SaaS, but they are transforming the company rapidly and acquiring a very impressive and diverse portfolio of companies and starting to make large dents in the SaaS market: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_Oracle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_Oracle
Spooky23 10y ago
No way. Oracle owns enterprise ERP. Every public company needs to run Oracle/Peoplesoft or SAP.
nl 10y ago
Oracle has a perfectly good business model which doesn't rely on OracleDB at all: they buy vertical enterprise software companies and then milk their customers. Worked for Sun, MySQL, Sieble, Peoplesoft, etc.
milesrout 10y ago
>The "next generation" of developers equals SQL engines with "old and bad", and when forced, it ends up with Postgres anyway. Anyone that equates SQL with "old and bad" is, not to put too fine a point on it, ignorant and/or stupid. >Except for Java, that is. The current tech is powered by Linux and there isn't really anything as big as Java on Linux. Python has been pretty significant and Go is making inroads, but the default is all Java. It is going to be interesting to watch how this will play out. I don't know where you get this idea from. The most popular languages on Linux are Perl, Bash, Python, C and C++.
StreamBright 10y ago
>> Their primary product (the Oracle DB engine) is being displaced by the NoSQL and things like Postgres. I am not sure about the NoSQL part. I see it as more and more companies providing data access to different most-definitely-SQL databases other than Oracle. Postgres even has a migration page: https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Oracle_to_Postgres_Conversion https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Oracle_to_Postgres_Conversi...
alecco 10y ago
I like seeing this sociopathic company circling the drain https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/06/oracle-boosts-cloud-sales-but-at-expense-of-java-and-everything-else/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/06/oracl... > essentially stopping development work on anything that is not directly tied to revenue generation
F_J_H 10y ago
All of the largest corporations in the world run on financial or ERP systems such as SAP, Oracle financials, Microsoft Dynamics etc., which sit on top of relational databases. While in the SV start-up world it may seem like NoSQL is taking over, the Enterprise database market is massive, and replacing the relational databases behind corporate ERP systems with NoSQL based solutions, (to the extent that is even possible/wise), will be a long time coming. Oracle has a giant footprint in a huge number of organizations across multiple industries. Love them or hate them, (and right now there is good reason to hate then), they are not going away anytime soon, and calling them "irrelevant in the tech landscape" seems premature/myopic given their massive install base and influence in the corporate/enterprise IT space.

by diebir 10y ago

gaius 10y ago

This layer of support is also becoming thinner and older. It's not about age(ism) it's that Oracle stabbed them in the back by pushing cloud over on-prem where these guys (and gals) were employed. Now Oracle's biggest supporters are re-skilling to Postgres et al and stopped recommending Oracle to their organisations...

UseStrict 10y ago
Agreed, we were stuck using Oracle at my job and it's an pain to maintain. Their cloud solutions are awful and on-premises suffered greatly. Their database engine might be solid, but everything around it was terrible. Things like PL/SQL being an unruly mess, even things like auto-incrementing columns were missing until the most recent release (12c R1). Coupled with insane licensing (arbitrarily changing the core factor for licensing) and auditing (soft limits, lots of hand-waving). It serves them right that they'd be losing out to Postgres.
tluyben2 10y ago
This is what is important to note; Oracle screwed their consulting partners as much as they could by pulling support and 'dev' in-house and simply taking over contracts of big clients. My previous company was hurt quite a lot when Oracle ate BEA. I still talk to clients from back then who miss our support and products as now Oracle is bleeding them dry providing crap. But it seemed like a good idea at the time I guess.

pjmlp 10y ago

Maybe for startups, on the enterprise space I am yet to see any customer move away from Oracle, SQL Server, DB2 and similar.

BinaryIdiot 10y ago
When I worked government contracting they had broad goals handed down which they must work toward without it being an explicit requirement. One of these goals? Get on top of an open source only stack for security, cost and future interoperability between other groups. I worked on several projects where they were originally using Oracle or MarkLogic and we transitioned them to Postgres or various other, open source tech. If the slow moving government is moving various projects away from Oracle, I would be shocked if some businesses weren't doing so as well. Now I don't know if moving away from proprietary is a trend or the more frequent than moving to them.
- beastcoast 10y ago
  Amazon is in the middle of a top-down migration off of Oracle. despite owning AWS, there are still a huge number of dependencies still running on Oracle.
- mastazi 10y ago
  If you are allowed to and comfortable with it, could you share which country was that? Over the years I have looked at government projects in Western Europe, SE Asia and Australia, Europeans seem to be the ones that care the most about open source, while at the other end of the spectrum SE Asian governments are interested in it just as much as it lets them save money (much less because of "free as in freedom"). Australia seems to me kind of a mixed bag, it boasts about using Drupal because it's open source but I know that some projects are based on proprietary technology. Please note that much of the information I gathered is second-hand and may be inaccurate.
  - bane 10y ago
    I can say from experience that in the U.S., the procurement people are definitely incentivized to look for solutions built on open standards and open source because of the ability for the government to have the option to not ever have to upgrade again, but to continue servicing this specific procurement (and this specific version) forever and ever and not be beholden to a specific vender or solution provider. I've even seen cases where one company will sell a solution into the government and lose the maintenance contract the next year to some entirely different company who underbid the original provider -- and there's minimal slowdown in technical execution because the entire stack is open to some degree. The government is starting to develop an allergy to vendor lock-in because of this.

bdcravens 10y ago

> Their primary product (the Oracle DB engine) is being displaced by the NoSQL and things like Postgres. Worth noting they own MySQL (via Sun acquisition)

metachris 10y ago
The developers moved to MariaDB, which is what everyone uses nowadays anyway rather than MySQL.
- wcarron 10y ago
  Patently false. I barely hear any talk about MariaDB whereas I still consistently hear about MySQL. Please define "Everybody" in this context, because it sounds like you've conflated it with "I".
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - Spivak 10y ago
    It's the same situation with SSL and TLS. If you ask for a MySQL database you have a good chance of getting MariaDB. Oracle's largest asset in this situation is the brand mindshare.
    - wcarron 10y ago
      What do you mean by "ask for a MySQL database"? If I were a client, I'd be rightfully pissed off if the developer I contracted gave me a completely different database than I requested in my stack. That's a complete breach of contract, if there was indeed MySQL on the spec sheet. Who are you working with that would flagrantly ignore the obvious differences between SQL and MariaDB? Personally, I've never seen MariaDB used in an instance where a simple MySQL db sufficed.
- vosper 10y ago
  Facebook, YouTube and Google are still massive users of MySQL. And MySQL development is moving along (admittedly after not much for a few years). I doubt MariaDB really figures compared to MySQL in industry use, or new installs.

tlogan 10y ago

The problem is the following: problems that Oracle products are solving are very hard. On other hand, our SV startup culture is all about making some quick websites and get rich schemes. So the conclusion is: Oracle is here to stay.

y_u_no_rust 10y ago
Yeah I honestly don't see oracle going away anytime soon
sb8244 10y ago
What hard problems are they solving that can't be solved with OSS today (tech problems)? I've heard things about their business apps division (business problems) and I can't say I particularly believe in their future there versus smaller focused companies.
- mattzito 10y ago
  So - I'm definitely not willing to go as far as the GP was with their statement, but Oracle's database technology is pretty amazing. I love postgres, Spark, NoSQL, etc. and think the progress they have made is amazing, but Oracle's database from a raw featureset is incredible. - Shared-something database clustering - true scale-out database clustering without writing sharding logic into your application, worrying about hot spots, or sacrificing significant performance due to overhead - query offload to storage for bulk reads - Flashback - someone wrote a bad update that might have messed with some data? You can tell the database to set your view of the database back to before that update to verify, and then decide if you want to move the whole database back, or just extract the records that were changed by that query - fine-grained permissioning - have a table with credit card numbers in it? Give everyone access to it, but the credit card numbers are all obfuscated - replication - block-level? statement-level? real-time? real-time with delay? Whatever you want. In fact, you can say "Hey, replicate this database to another datacenter, don't make it synchronous, but don't let it get more than 10 minutes out of sync" - also, btw, when you need to failover that database, if you're feeling really brave, oracle can do the whole thing for you automatically, because their database client will notify a watcher that a majority of them have lost the necessary access to the database, but can talk to the standby, and the watcher handles the failover I could go on and on. There's just so much intelligence in the Oracle database platform. Would I ever pay for it? No, it's better to build applications that don't need that level of sophistication. But if you're a big company who doesn't want to write software to be smart about data storage and recovery, Oracle does an amazing job at just guaranteeing your data won't go away. On the business apps side of things, I think their software is mostly terrible, but I also think that they do focus on problems that OSS typically has not. If you are a manufacturer of satellites, there is probably not an OSS ERP solution that will work for you. If you need to store 300,000 personnel records, there's probably not an OSS HCM solution for you. None of this means that they're not eventually doomed nor that they're not shitty, but it is very fair to say that their software deals with hard problems that OSS has not typically focused on.

yomly 10y ago

Don't forget Amazon Aurora, and Redshift. With the number of big name customers AWS, these products are the most scary to direct enterprise Oracle DB. Though the smaller and new tech giants of tomorrow will probably be running your Postgres and MySQLs as you mention

ehsankia 10y ago

Basically, instead of innovating, or as the hip kids nowadays say, "pivoting", they just want to make easy money with stupid copyright claims and harmful tactics. I find this strategy extremely toxic and malicious. Google may do a lot of stupid things, and people often make fun of their "don't be evil" motto, but let's be honest, the shit Oracle keeps pulling here over and over is the real definition of evil. It's purely for profit and doesn't help in anyway to advance technology or humankind.

djeunneun 10y ago
>don't be evil Like censoring news articles which portraited a certain presidential candidate in a negative light for cash and goodies promised behind doors? Yeah, it diesn't get more evil than that.
- witty_username 10y ago
  Source?
tempodox 10y ago
Microsoft's move to build their own version of Java with C# proved rather smart in that light.

bbanyc 10y ago

I wouldn't count Oracle out just yet. They're still much bigger than SCO or its predecessors ever were. They're also under the same management that built the company up from nothing, whereas SCO was a new management team that took over Caldera and was trying to pivot them to the product they'd just bought from the former Santa Cruz Operation, had no idea what they were doing, and eventually settled on litigation as a business model. (SCO, amazingly, is still continuing its litigation, despite having no products, employees, or assets remaining. Oral arguments on probably-the-last-appeal are March 22 in Denver.)

coolgeek 10y ago

> The "next generation" of developers equals SQL engines with "old and bad" I think that what you mean is: - they don't understand the relational model - they don't understand the tradeoffs of ACID vs BASE - they never bothered to actually learn SQL - they *think* that they have "big data" Don't get me wrong - there are compelling use cases for, and decent products for, every class of non-relational database. But there's nothing out there that can handle the general use case like an RDBMS. Anybody who doesn't understand that isn't qualified to be making organization-wide decisions.

WallWextra 10y ago
They don't have to be right, they just have to exist in sufficient numbers.
secstate 10y ago
PostgresQL is an RDBMS and has increasingly been demonstrated as able to hold it's own against closed source rivals. I think the OPs tossing NOSQL in there was poor form, and I think "SQL engines" could be replaced with DBAs. The world still needs RDBMS and we desperately need people who understand them from an engineering perspective. But as an average app developer, I can scale my product to serve hundreds of thousands of people with really shitty DB architecture by simply throwing RAM at Postgres. That means Oracle corporate promises and hoards of query-optimizing DBAs are not the default for most fast (and even some moderately fast) moving startups anymore.
- dreamcompiler 10y ago
  What can Oracle do that Postgres can't, then? Can Oracle function with less RAM than Postgres?
  - pjmlp 10y ago
    Does Postgres already support distributed transactions across cluster nodes?
  - reitanqild 10y ago

daniel_iversen 10y ago

You may not like Oracle, but I bet they'll be around, thriving for decades.. Sure the Oracle DB is being replaced somewhat by other technologies and a shifting market to SaaS, but they are transforming the company rapidly and acquiring a very impressive and diverse portfolio of companies and starting to make large dents in the SaaS market: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_Oracle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_Oracle

Spooky23 10y ago

No way. Oracle owns enterprise ERP. Every public company needs to run Oracle/Peoplesoft or SAP.

nl 10y ago

Oracle has a perfectly good business model which doesn't rely on OracleDB at all: they buy vertical enterprise software companies and then milk their customers. Worked for Sun, MySQL, Sieble, Peoplesoft, etc.

milesrout 10y ago

>The "next generation" of developers equals SQL engines with "old and bad", and when forced, it ends up with Postgres anyway. Anyone that equates SQL with "old and bad" is, not to put too fine a point on it, ignorant and/or stupid. >Except for Java, that is. The current tech is powered by Linux and there isn't really anything as big as Java on Linux. Python has been pretty significant and Go is making inroads, but the default is all Java. It is going to be interesting to watch how this will play out. I don't know where you get this idea from. The most popular languages on Linux are Perl, Bash, Python, C and C++.

StreamBright 10y ago

>> Their primary product (the Oracle DB engine) is being displaced by the NoSQL and things like Postgres. I am not sure about the NoSQL part. I see it as more and more companies providing data access to different most-definitely-SQL databases other than Oracle. Postgres even has a migration page: https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Oracle_to_Postgres_Conversion https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Oracle_to_Postgres_Conversi...

alecco 10y ago

I like seeing this sociopathic company circling the drain https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/06/oracle-boosts-cloud-sales-but-at-expense-of-java-and-everything-else/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/06/oracl... > essentially stopping development work on anything that is not directly tied to revenue generation

F_J_H 10y ago

All of the largest corporations in the world run on financial or ERP systems such as SAP, Oracle financials, Microsoft Dynamics etc., which sit on top of relational databases. While in the SV start-up world it may seem like NoSQL is taking over, the Enterprise database market is massive, and replacing the relational databases behind corporate ERP systems with NoSQL based solutions, (to the extent that is even possible/wise), will be a long time coming. Oracle has a giant footprint in a huge number of organizations across multiple industries. Love them or hate them, (and right now there is good reason to hate then), they are not going away anytime soon, and calling them "irrelevant in the tech landscape" seems premature/myopic given their massive install base and influence in the corporate/enterprise IT space.