Oracle has typically been a licensing centric company. The "named user plus" licensing thing can be unwieldy for most small firms. The past few years have been

Oracle has typically been a licensing centric company. The "named user plus" licensing thing can be unwieldy for most small firms. The past few years have been bad for it as a result. SAAS based innovation, unconventional databases, database scaling bottlenecks, parallelization, in-memory computing, mobility and a lot of the low cost innovations around these have emerged as a threat to Oracle. The options it has had are acquiring OpenSource and aggressively defending patents. All the while its marketing teams continue to whitewash offerings like exalogic as "cloud" offerings. I feel that Oracle tends to explore options to corral innovation. Its OpenSource portfolio is the classic trojan horse. Expect all sorts of lock-in.