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Oracle’s Aggressive Sales Tactics Are Backfiring with Customers
- robert_foss 8y agoPaywall
- ProAm 8y agoJust press the 'Reader view' button. The whole article is 3.5 paragraphs
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- kinsomo 8y agoI can't read most of the article because of the paywall, but I'm glad Oracle's greed is catching up to it. Besides its database and Java (which is still really Sun), every of their products I've been forced to use have been overpriced, poorly supported crap. Also, their cloud pricing must be really bad. My employer has been 100% Oracle database for decades, but it's now officially banned from all cloud projects due to licensing cost.
- zwischenzug 8y agoI've seen similar. No more Oracle licenses at any price.
- corpMaverick 8y agoWe used to use PostgreSql. But our CIO was able to negotiate very inexpensive Oracle licenses. Now we have a bunch of crappy databases that are a pain to upgrade. But we are saving a lot of money.
- dijit 8y agoAre you really saving money, if you wouldn't have spent it otherwise? I mean, how can you know that even the worst postgresql installation wouldn't require only 10% of what you're paying now in contractors/support?
- magduf 8y agoI think he meant that sarcastically. PostgreSQL is free, aside from support costs, while Oracle has a license fee. But they're "saving" money because they negotiated a "cheaper" license fee. This like like how it's more economical for me to buy a top-end $100k Mercedes if I can negotiate a $10k savings off of MSRP, rather than a low-end $17k Toyota where I can only negotiate $500 off of the MSRP. See, with the Mercedes S-class, I'm saving $10k!!! I wouldn't save $10k with the Toyota... \s
- corpMaverick 8y agoWe went from free and great to cheap and crappy. But the CIO got to show off his negotiating skills.
- gowld 8y agoThat's page 37, section 2 of the Oracle sales playbook.
- jandrese 8y agoHe was able to negotiate a better price than free? Or were you paying for Postgre pro and a support contract?
- lurker456 8y agoI bet in a couple of years the next CIO will discover that the TCO is quite a bit higher then expected.
- sliken 8y agoHeh, that's the trap. Your CIO bluffed them into a price this time. You can be sure you will be in for an unpleasant surprise next time you go to renew.
- mr_overalls 8y agoSame here. After what honestly seemed like a mob-style shakedown for licensing fees last year (they honestly used the threat of litigation to force us to buy their cloud offerings), my employer is in the process of migrating 20+ years of Oracle-backed apps to the .NET ecosystem.
- msla 8y agoMirror: https://archive.li/P2au0 https://archive.li/P2au0
- bhouston 8y agoOracle always does high pressure high priced sales. It does not catch up with them generally. They push their customers hard and there has always been backlash but then Oracle adjusts slightly so it is still high pressure, high priced, but not too high. I sort of respect them from a sales perspective, they push it to the margin on the sales front. From a pure sales perspective, few are as good as Oracle for extracting value from their customers. I am not that ballsy personally and it isn't my style but I am not anywhere as financially as successful as Oracle.
- suyash 8y agoOracle has the best technical sales people for a reason.
- Annatar 8y agoEven if that were true, which is highly debatable, what does that statement have to do with Oracle's high pressure sales tactics, and what does it have to do with them destroying the Solaris and SPARC market?
- skookumchuck 8y agoORCL did not participate in the tech rally of the last couple years. I think their tactics have caught up with them.
- mrbill 8y agoNothing new at all, they've been doing this for 20+ years. Interesting to see the Halliburton mention though, I worked there in IT for 12 years and there was an embedded Oracle install in most of our major software products.
- bcantrill 8y agoFourteen years ago (!), I reflected on why software vendors are able to get away with bad behavior[1] -- until they can't, of course. That two of the three database companies I mention are in the dustbin of history should be telling -- and I stand by my most basic conclusion that proprietary software companies cannot outrun open source equivalents in perpetuity. May the long run arrive sooner rather than later! [1] http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2004/08/28/the-economics-of-software/ http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2004/08/28/the-economics-of-soft...
- shadowtree 8y agoI don't think this is true with SaaS. You still run it in AWS, Azure, Google.
- yebyen 8y agoTo an extent though, it is! All of those vendors (some more than others) are pretty serious about Kubernetes, and they're a tiny fraction of the list[1]. I keep hearing that AWS Lambda has won serverless (Functions as a Service), but as a fellow K8S-bettor who abhors vendor lock-in and follows the news from CNCF friends, I'm not sold on that. Azure has Brigade, Pivotal (Cloud Foundry) has Riff to compete with that, and I'd guess there are other solutions in the same vein that I haven't heard of; well both of these solutions at least are portable to anywhere you run your Kubernetes clusters. As long as you don't leverage the other vendor SaaS APIs too heavily and keep as much of your control plane inside of Kubernetes as possible, you can always take the solutions you build there with you anywhere. Those are open-source solutions built on SaaS platforms, and the fact that things like those exist... is pretty much the only reason I'd consider those platforms? Even potentially say that I'd prefer them over AWS (except that we're an AWS centered shop, where you can also run Kubernetes if it's your fancy, and that we do all of those lock-in things...) [1]: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1LxSqBzjOxfGx3cmtZ4EbB_BGCxT_wlxW_xgHVVa23es/edit#gid=0 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1LxSqBzjOxfGx3cmtZ4Eb...
- dankohn1 8y agoThe 12 open source serverless projects that can be installed on Kubernetes: https://landscape.cncf.io/grouping=landscape&landscape=installable-platform https://landscape.cncf.io/grouping=landscape&landscape=insta...
- dangerboysteve 8y agoWhy link to an article behind a paywall ?
- s73v3r_ 8y agoCause reporters need to eat too?
- praneshp 8y agoNothing against it in the guidelines.
- comex 8y agoThe FAQ[1] says: > Are paywalls ok? > It's ok to post stories from sites with paywalls that have workarounds. Is there a workaround in this case? [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
- praneshp 8y agoIf you had continued to read on: "In comments, it's ok to ask how to read an article and to help other users do so. But please don't post complaints about paywalls. Those are off topic." Anyway, I was not 100% correct, I didn't know about the workaround requirement.
- Bucephalus355 8y agoI read a similar article in 1995 about how MySQL was going to put Oracle out of business. Oracle now owns MySQL. I live in Austin, Texas and definitely do not work for Oracle. However they have plans to hire 10,000 people here. For reference, that number represents 40% of Facebook’s headcount. Apple, another old-guard company (Steve Jobs and Larry Ellison were great friends), is doing something similar. For all of Oracle’s badness, there is a certain Trump-like authenticity to them. They kind of know their bad, and they just keep on keeping on. Facebook, meanwhile, had to shove it down our throats how awesome and beautiful and world-connecting they were.
- teachrdan 8y agoYeah, this is the same criticism of Oracle I've been hearing for years. I was under the naive impression that Amazon RDS [0] was going to be an Oracle-killer. Has anyone here actually used it to transition away from Oracle? Because, as I understood it, Oracle makes it exceedingly difficult to transition out of its ecosystem. [0] https://aws.amazon.com/rds/oracle/ https://aws.amazon.com/rds/oracle/
- gowld 8y agoIt's like AOL. The old customers stay until they die, and the new customers-to-be stop showing up.
- e12e 8y ago> Oracle now owns MySQL. Well, yeah. And no (thanks to MariaDB). Similar story with Solaris/ZFS. > (...) in Austin, Texas (...) [Oracle] have plans to hire 10,000 people (...) Apple (...) is doing something similar. That's interesting. I wonder if this will be about "more cloud" for both companies. Maybe we've seen "peak Free Software" and more secret sauce will hide behind SaaS paywalls in the near future. I think the AGPL was rather prescient here; unfortunately it's not proven successful in the way GPL was. So if and when the big players move everything "home" there's little left on the outside. Not saying it will happen - both Apple, Google and Microsoft are sharing more than before. As of now.
- tensor 8y agoOracle's email marketing uses similar tactics to scammers. Several people at my company got emails that went something like: "Hi I'm ___ and I'm the new account rep for the services you have with us...." We don't have any services with them, so this certainly raised an eyebrow. Did someone open an account with them in our name? Did someone at my company subscribe to their services without me knowing? Discovering this was actually a sales phishing tactic certainly cemented us never wanting to do business with their cloud services.
- le-mark 8y agoYou are required to register an account with them to access JDK downloads, sql developer, their help forums etc. Its really quite a pita. It may be these accounts they're targeting?
- sbarre 8y agoThis sounds a lot like pure-commission "outside sales pretending to be inside sales" teams who are tasked with casting as wide a net as possible to cold-call anyone they can to try to warm them up for a real rep.
- gowld 8y agoHi, I'm the new account rep for the services you have with us. You have 0 services with us? I'm the account rep for all of them! Perhaps you'd like to expand your service suite?
- tajen 8y agoI still don’t understand what Oracle does better than Postgres. For free, it provides a cleaner data structure, DDL transactions, better performance, closer to SQL standards... Of course Oracle does sales better.
- dragonwriter 8y ago> I still don’t understand what Oracle does better than Postgres Compatibility with established Oracle apps, and a whole lot of database-peripheral stuff (much of which has better alternatives, but those are often newer, and we're back to legacy compatibility.) Some of this (more on the DB than peripheral part) you can mitigate by buying Postgres Plus, which is a proprietary enterprise version with, among other things, extensions for Oracle compatibility, and it's still vastly cheaper than Oracle. But no one (well, except maybe MS, who can leverage Windows and .NET to sell SQL Server) is close to Oracle when it comes to selling RDBMS software to enterprises.
- sofaofthedamned 8y agoPlus, they have a lot of vertical market apps (POS systems for a start) that only work with their database, which is where the shakedown begins.
- mulmen 8y agoPartitioning for one. Postgres is getting closer but Oracle blows it out of the water and has had the feature for many years. Oracle also does clustering out of the box, again for years. Those are the big ones off the top of my head but I'm sure there are more. These features are very expensive and full of pitfalls but they exist and Postgres isn't really even close to feature parity. I say this as a huge fan of Postgres.
- kentosi 8y agoI don't know why you got downvoted, because it's a valid question. But apart from what mulmen mentioned regarding partitioning and clustering out of the box, I have my opinion. Having worked in large finance institutions, there's (unfortunately) the mentality that if your software is backed by a large organisation (Microsoft, Oracle) then it is somehow more credible.
- krylon 8y agoInteresting timing. Just today we got a cold call from an Oracle sales rep. ;-) Fortunately, our awesome Purchasing person got rid of them quickly.
- cryptonector 8y agoPaging Bryan Cantrill. Paging Bryan Cantrill! Oldie but goldie, by bmc: https://blogs.oracle.com/bmc/the-economics-of-software https://blogs.oracle.com/bmc/the-economics-of-software EDIT: Oops, bcantrill already commented.
- bborud 8y agoThe thing is that not only do they demand a high price for licenses and support deals: when the shit hits the fan and you NEED the support deal, you discover that the one you have is worthless and they only want to extort more money from you. Quite a few companies have blacklisted Oracle over the past decade. Big ones.
- tonyedgecombe 8y agoI wonder if Oracle has a looming problem developing new customers. I can't imagine any startups are banging on their door for a database when Postgres is good enough for most cases. As these startups become the corporates of the future are Oracle going to struggle?
- polartx 8y agoits a big problem. I worked as a Sales Engineer for them years ago when they rolled out their sales cloud and marketing cloud offering (shortly after the eloqua acquisition). The majority of all deals are upsold or cross-sold into existing accounts. They also created a promotion that allowed customers to early terminate their on-premise licenses and roll the credit (that would have otherwise been surrendered) into the corresponding cloud product.
- skookumchuck 8y agoI'm a longtime ORCL investor, and sold it all a couple years ago because of this. Any company where customers use it because they have to rather than they want to is a company with little long term prospects.
- wildfire 8y agoWhy is this even a story? When has agressive sales tactics gone well for a company?
- Annatar 8y agoThis is a story because Oracle needs to change their practices. Yesterday. I for one am glad someone brought it up and that it's being discussed. It's overdue by about two decades.
- jacksmith21006 8y agoOracle s just a sucky company. Plus there is now excellent open source data bases and even better cloud options.
- Area12 8y agoDoes anybody remember when a default install of Oracle RDBMS also installed ask.com? It was at that point that I realised that a significant part of Oracle Corporation no longer cared about how disreputable they appeared. I can't even imagine that they got all that much money from ask.com, on the scale of their total revenue.
- bzzzt 8y agoEven though I've got no love for Oracle business, there are a few facts: The Oracle software with the bundled Ask.com toolbar was the Java client installation. And the decision to bundle the toolbar was made by Sun microsystems (before they were bought). They probably signed a contract for a few years which is why Oracle couldn't get rid of it earlier.
- samgranieri 8y agoMy old colleagues at a previous employer used to get hounded by Oracle sales reps. Now they're moving to Microsoft SQL Server. I wish they would've moved to Postgres, but still, getting rid of Oracle is huge progress