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Oracle loses bid to upend HP’s $3B win

• chris_wot 5y ago
  One wonders how long it will take for Oracle to become largely irrelevant.
  • twiddling 5y ago
    like IBM irrelevant? still generating revenue but not seen as influential within tech.
  • mastrsushi 5y ago
    It’s at least noticeable, what do they even make anymore that’s valuable? DB software, Java?
    • stephankoelle 5y ago
      GraalVM
    • brianwawok 5y ago
      https://www.statista.com/statistics/269728/oracles-revenue-by-business-segment-since-2008/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/269728/oracles-revenue-b... Cloud services and license support is the top bucket, unclear what all the entails. They own a LOT of business oriented very pricey software (Netsuite etc)...
    • not1ofU 5y ago
      virtualbox
    • NikolaNovak 5y ago
      They are a strong name in Enterprise Resource Planning software, both internally developed and acquired. Besides licenses, they do a lot of ERP hosting, likely recognized as "Cloud" revenue. (Disclaimer/Source - I've been a PeopleSoft admin/architect/ops working for IBM for 20 years; PeopleSoft was bought by Oracle in 2005; all opinions my own etc:) They made other plays - there is Oracle Linux as rebrand of RHEL; a few rebranded/purchased virtualization as well as hardware products; etc etc
    • deelowe 5y ago
      They are pivoting their enterprise db and server (sun) business into a cloud services business. Oracle solutions require a ton of infrastructure to run properly at scale and they are using that to pitch their own cloud. I wonder how long it'll be before they start building moats to defend against "bare metal" solutions from other providers.
  • snek_case 5y ago
    You would think, but the stock price is still going up and they have a lot of cash on hand. I don't really understand why anyone does business with them, but they are likely to be around for a long time. https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/ORCL?p=ORCL https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/ORCL?p=ORCL
    • markus_zhang 5y ago
      They are probably going to last really long considering the impact they made before FAANG took off. Many of their customers are governments and quasi-government companies (think bank and telecom) so I actually think they are going to last a lot longer than we want.
      • ThePadawan 5y ago
        I wonder at what point anyone will be willing to work for them and at what salary, though. Surely there comes a point where even paying triple the standard rate, you can't get more engineers working on dusty old code while remaining profitable and their customers' best offer.
        • markus_zhang 5y ago
          Golden time for retired contractors. The same you see for the COBOL generation.
    • NikolaNovak 5y ago
      >>why anyone does business with them, but they are likely to be around for a long time The answer is partially in the question. For large enterprises where large part of IT is a strict cost centre - the "boring" areas of HR/Pay, Financials, CRM, ERM, SCM, etc - predictability, support, longevity, reliability are far more important than sexiness, new technologies, or even immediate cost of license compared to cost of change and uncertainty.
      • basch 5y ago
  • evilduck 5y ago
    Oracle is relevant outside of a courthouse?
  • lambersley 5y ago
    Oracle has made substantial push into the hyperscale cloud space in the last 2 years. Even though they lag quite a bit behind AWS/Azure/GCP, they are far from irrelevant. (Revenue grew approximately 26% year over year in 2019) While Oracle DB is still dominant (At the end of 2019, Oracle was the leader in DBMS revenue ($15.15 billion) and market share (27.5%)) in large enterprises, Oracle will retain a place in the industry. (430,000 customers in 175 countries and revenue of $39 billion for fiscal year 2020)
    • hectormalot 5y ago
      Not contesting the facts, but important to read them in context. Market share by revenue is likely biased towards Oracle vs market share by usage/installs. I’m under the impression that those migrating towards other DBMS’s are partly doing so to get away from the high pricing of Oracle. So even if usage of eg RDS Aurora and Oracle are the same, it would show Oracle as doing really well. If I’m correct, and the underlying user base for Oracle is declining, then their numbers can only go down in the long term. But, they have a great money printing machine today, loads of enterprise sales expertise, and the buffers (read: time) to deal with this change. So, although I don’t think they’ll become irrelevant, I wouldn’t say they’re doing particularly well either (from a trends and market direction perspective)
    • TheRealDunkirk 5y ago
      Larry Ellison started the Oracle ball rolling by selling an up-and-coming database technology, based on relationships, which was an R&D study at Stanford? (IIRC) to the FBI. I presume that Oracle powers all the "signals" gathering at the NSA/CIA/FBI. That alone would be enough to keep Oracle in business forever.
      • hobs 5y ago
        There were no Oracle databases in the Snowden revelations, all MySQL iirc.
        • Denvercoder9 5y ago
  • systems 5y ago
    well, they need to move to the cloud fast but they are already kind of there, they own NetSuite which is the number 1 cloud ERP they also own Oracle ERP which is another top 5 cloud ERP they own peoplesoft/jd edwards and all their clients they next to SAP, own the enterprise apps market and unlike SAP, they seem to be serious about competing with AWS ans Azure, Oracle OCI, see to get niece reviews So how long will it take for Oracle to be irrelevant, if OCI and NetSuite continue to move in the right directions, for as long as people have money
    • sjg007 5y ago
      They have a cloud offering
    • hestefisk 5y ago
      Seems the Oracle PR department found HN :)
  • beached_whale 5y ago
    Enterprise market is a nice place to be and they are firmly entrenched
  • tyingq 5y ago
    They've certainly started getting flat in revenue: https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/ORCL/oracle/revenue https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/ORCL/oracle/revenu... My guess is they will hang on for a long time as the reigning king of on-prem. They aren't hurting yet, because the companies that are losing ground in on-prem are losing it both to AWS/Azure, but also losing the on-prem ground to Oracle. Eventually, the continued downward spiral of on-prem will hit them. But on-prem really never goes away. Oracle will just become the king of a much smaller hill.
  • jollybean 5y ago
    As long as RDBMS and Java are around they will be. And the information revolution is just beginning for most of the 4 billion citizens on the planet.
• xadhominemx 5y ago
  From June 15th
  • wil421 5y ago
    Yes. There is another article about intel ending Itanium and I thought it was relevant for today’s discussion.
• Tsiklon 5y ago
  Yikes, 5 years between the ruling and the appeal being finalised. The earnings by the lawyers must be astronomical.
  • sabalaba 5y ago
    $10s of millions of dollars
  • markus_zhang 5y ago
    That's why they love those kind of things. Layers and layers of laws and regulations.
  • throwawaylinux 5y ago
    I have a question about that. Big companies like these have (I believe) pretty hefty legal departments, and would be constantly involved in legal negotiations and court proceedings (though not always at such a scale). So why do court cases cost them so much in legal fees? Do they outsource representation for these big cases, or do they just extrapolate a lot of the costs from payroll, or what?
    • gmueckl 5y ago
      I doubt that legal departments are good at big court cases. They tend to be more concerned with mundane busywork like drafting contracts and reviewing public statements for potential issues. So it makes sense to outsource lawsuits, especially bigger ones, to experts with experience at court.
      • conductr 5y ago
        This is true in my experience at various large corps I've worked for. The legal department has a rather small headcount but a massive consulting budget. They hire other lawyers with local jurisdiction experience, subject matter expertise, courtroom experience, etc. Their day-to-day hands on work is 1) managing all of the outsourcing 2) mundane corporate contract stuff which is more frequent/consistent in volume.
      • 5y ago
• sparkling 5y ago
  Wild speculation: i feel like the $3b from this lawsuit is far more than any revenue they may have lost due too the lack or Oracle products on their Itanium machines.
  • tyingq 5y ago
    The suit seems to have been filed in 2011, and HP said: "The Itanium product line was highly profitable for HP, generating over $2 billion in annual profits in 2010" And, also "84 percent of Itanium servers ran Oracle’s database software." So, even though Itanium was pretty well dead for new sales to new customers 2010, they were still selling enough of them to make $2B in profit (not revenue) the year prior. That is, sales to customers that were sort of stuck on Itanium/HP-UX, and not yet ready to switch to something else. Certainly, an EOL announcement for Oracle on Itanium would have kicked some Itanium-Locked-In customers into action faster than they would have otherwise. I'm not sure how to translate $2B/year profit on Itanium hardware into lost sales due to the Oracle announcement. But, $3B doesn't sound outrageous in relative terms. Sounds like 1.5 years of H/W sales ending earlier than projected due to the stark message in Oracle's EOL announcement.
  • SloopJon 5y ago
    On the flip side, $3B is a lot more than it would have cost Oracle to keep supporting the platform. Having worked on a product that at one time or another supported Windows (including IA64), VMS (including IA64), and thirty-one flavors of Unix (including HP-UX and Linux on IA64), the marginal cost of continuing to support a platform is not that high. Sure, if the demand isn't there, we drop it, and we have dropped a lot of platforms over the years, including VMS and everything IA64. If HP claimed the demand was there, and furthermore claimed a contract required us to keep going, it would be a no-brainer. I don't get it. I mean, it's Oracle, so I get it, but I don't get it.
    • mark-r 5y ago
      I'm sure Oracle never even contemplated the possibility that they'd get hit with a $3B bill. Makes their company name kind of ironic, doesn't it?
• darksaints 5y ago
  Regardless of the merits of the lawsuit, any day that Oracle gets sued into oblivion is a good day.
• perryizgr8 5y ago
  Kind of tangential, but the instruction set design of the Itanium was very good. I wish it had more success.
  • rafaelturk 5y ago
    I'm still puzzled why Itanium didn't go any further. A precursor of the ARM revolution. And Intel just wrongly killed the project.
    • tux3 5y ago
      Well, have you seen the famous Itanium Sales Forecast graph? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Itanic#Itanium_(Merced):_2001 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Itanic#Itanium_(Merced):_2001
    • tyingq 5y ago
      It depended on compilers smart enough to make not-parallel-friendly code run well in parallel. In a way that would outpace the price/performance growth curve of the (somewhat new at the time) x86-64 CPUs. The compilers never fully delivered on that. X86-64 just beat them with process size and clock speed on a less elegant architecture.
      • marcosdumay 5y ago
        Well, I'd say that whether VLIW is more elegant than OoO is a matter of subjective opinion.
        • guenthert 5y ago
          Elegance might be in the eye of the beholder, security is not.
    • blacktriangle 5y ago
      I worked on a project mid-aughts to port a scientific package to Itanium. The issue that we observed was that Itanium really pushed the hard work out to the compiler and by association the devs to make everything work with their compilers in order to get the full benefits. And since very few people had Itaniums and the compilers weren't quite there yet, the overall dev effort was not worth it. Somewhat of a chicken and egg problem. ARM managed to be worth the trouble since it solved a real problem of power useage which got it the installed base, at which point it was worth the trouble of supporting.
• InternalRun 5y ago
  There are few things as satisfying than watching Oracle lose court cases.
  • csunbird 5y ago
    I really _really_ hope that HP continues making Itanium based servers available for 30 more years, even if they are not selling a single unit, just to spite Oracle, for the comedic value only. In all seriousness, HP can do that to get some out of court settlement money from Oracle, as Oracle clearly does not want to continue supporting the platform.
    • mrweasel 5y ago
      Just have the Itanium servers as something you can order, but not actually build the unless a costumer actually places an order. In reality Oracle is off the hook given that Intel is stopping Itanium production.
      • jabl 5y ago
        Can't HPE stock a bunch of Itanium systems in some warehouse, just to be able to claim they are still selling them? Doesn't matter that Intel isn't producing chips anymore?
        • mrweasel 5y ago
          Wikipedia says that HP stopped accepting orders for Itanium systems on dec. 31 2020.
          • jabl 5y ago
            Oh well, scratch that evil mastermind plan then. ;)
            • dangerbird2 5y ago
              Don't worry, HP sells more than enough inkjet cartridges to keep their evil mastermind dreams alive (I know that's not HPE's business, but whatever)
• tartoran 5y ago
  Great. I worked for a governmental agency and they started migrating away from oracle. It was a gargantuan task but it was supposed to save them a whole lot of money. Oracle is a greedy company whose innovation pace has dropped significantly. Their success lies in locked in clients who have to overpay for their services.
  • mark-r 5y ago
    They need to be greedy to be able to pay out judgements like this! Yes I know, the greed came first.
  • Someone1234 5y ago
    Many of Oracle's locked in customers come from startups that Oracle purchased. Oracle goes around looking at the lock-in potential and acquires based on that, then they ride that startup product's reputation for as long as possible until they just leave it to rot. They also try to bundle in existing Oracle products (e.g. Oracle DB) almost giving it away to get your foot in the door then dumping on you. Unfortunately a lot of companies find themselves in a business relationship with Oracle, even after never having purchase an Oracle branded product.
    • tkojames 5y ago
      This right here is what happened to my dad. By accident he started working in the wine industry as a IT project manager and developer. They used a product from JD Edwards for large scale wine production. Oracle bought them. The Oracle product they had was way more expensive. For awhile they let them use the JD Edwards product that worked well. They wine and dined him we got to go to Oracle park luxury box for game etc.. but eventually they told him you got to use the Oracle one now for like 10x the cost... Software was junk anyways so he just ended up building stuff in house. Saved the company millions in licensing fees.
    • fnord77 5y ago
      so maybe I can get Oracle to buy my startup if I use Oracle products?
  • 5y ago