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My previous experiences in dealing with Oracle as part of an RFP is that it's like something out of Mad Men, in the worst possible way: we had a bunch of requir
by rodgerd 6y ago
My previous experiences in dealing with Oracle as part of an RFP is that it's like something out of Mad Men, in the worst possible way: we had a bunch of requirements that they didn't want to meet, because they were trying to sell their DB appliances, they berated the RFP committee for having those requirements. They laid complaints with our management line against one staffer for asking "hostile" questions.
When they didn't get the decision they wanted, they quickly escalated to exec and director level, and the exec of a major shareholder to try and get the decision overturned.
It wasn't an especially pleasant experience personally, because obviously it involved a lot of very personal attacks by a vendor, but at the same time it was fascinating to watch how they networked from the top down to try to get the decision that they wanted, and run roughshod over the SMEs and process.
Some years later one of the sales team sent me a "Virtualisation for Dummies" book and told me I could learn something from it.
- Spooky23 6y agoReminds me of when a person on the Ars Technica forums posted something that upset the sensibilities of EMC, (it was something about an Avamar bug iirc) who cyberstalked the poster and called the CIO or CFO of his employer.
- Sylamore 6y agoI have had Oracle, CA and Cisco sales teams do this to me, and I had one consulting company another manager brought in to work on AD forest consolidation start a campaign to get me fired after I outed their supposed SME as having no actual AD experience ("DNS has nothing to do with Active Directory" was just one gem he pushed). While unfortunately it worked for Oracle and CA, Cisco never really had enough juice with the executives to change architecture decisions after they'd been made outside of core networking. It's made me always work to get Oracle and CA products replaced wherever I have a voice as a result. They may have scored one small $500k deal at that previous employer. I've often found I'm not alone in my dislike for these companies for their shady sales practices, and at least for Oracle enough of us worked together to lose them an 8-figure deal by showing we could do something different for far less once.
- rodgerd 6y agoA lot of it seems to be the context that they're operating in: Oracle seems to be a really brutal environment for sales staff; I see account managers disappear every 6-12 months, and everything I've heard from people who work for resellers or Oracle in those kind of roles paints it as being absolutely ruthless in a "Glengarry Glen Ross" kind of way.
- raverbashing 6y agoAh yes those big companies have specialist "salespeople" whose job is berate the lower-ups and suck-up to the higher-ups trying to sell their overpriced crap