6 ms·

Oracle Consulting Rate Card

59 points by pwim 15y ago

rdl 15y ago
Those rates are about half of what I'd expect.
- thepumpkin1979 15y ago
  Yep, I'd like to see the rate card for SAP AG and compare hehe.
- mgkimsal 15y ago
  you don't know how long it takes them to do anything though. hourly rates are one thing, but unless they've got reasonable time frames for building stuff, it doesn't really matter. I typically charge 3-5x what 'regular' web developers do, and I catch flak for that from some potential clients. I also tend to get stuff done 5-10x faster than many other 'regular' web developers too, so I don't have any issues justifying myself. The people that care about hourly rates move on, the people that care about getting their problem solved quickly stay. I imagine Oracle's got 'standard' implementation timelines for common scenarios.
- beedogs 15y ago
  I don't see any date anywhere, though. Those rates could be from ten years ago.
  - toyg 15y ago
    Comparing to current Euro rates (which I know), they look about right at today prices.
achille 15y ago
Also note the Oracle supplied GSA (Federal) price list: (see page 21) http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/pricing/gsa-pricelist-070605.pdf http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/pricing/gsa-pricelist-070... Which means that's the cheapest rate Oracle is allowed to give. By law.
jasonkester 15y ago
Seems quite reasonable. I sell a white label version of one of my products (Twiddla), with an API for integrating it into your site. From time to time I field requests from people who want to build their thing on top of our platform, asking if we do consulting. I tell them yes, then quote what it would take to build what they want and 90% of them have a heart attack on the spot. "But we have this quote from another developer saying he can do the whole thing for $1,500!" I don't doubt it. But then I suspect his dev didn't build Twiddla. I did, so I charge accordingly. I recommend having your own team do your integration since really it's quite straightforward, but if you really need it to work right and you need it fast, you can go straight to the source (but it'll cost you.) It's the same thing with Oracle. Sure you can find a guy to build your thing for $25/hr, and chances are he'll probably even do a good job. But if you want to remove all the "probably's" from that sentence you can pay 10x as much and have Oracle do it for you.
- 16s 15y ago
  I've had some bad experience with consultants. So much so that I'm hesitant to use them now. They'll have a plane to catch to fly to the next client's site. And they'll rush to catch that plane and make mistakes on your project, etc. They have the mentality that this is "not their baby". If you do hire one, make sure you have a maintenance agreement with them so they can't just set it and forget it leaving you with a big bill and problems. Just my experience. Edit: I've never used an Oracle consultant. My comment is meant at technical consultants in general.
  - mgkimsal 15y ago
    And I've had bad experiences with clients who want to treat an external consultant as just another body they don't have to treat any differently with respect to communication. There's pitfalls on both sides, but I've had people not give me information for 3 weeks, fiddling with other projects, then get upset, after our initial agreed on engagement timeframe is done, when they can't just have me stay involved for another month. I've said before, and I'll say it again - almost all projects I've been involved with that failed or were extremely bad projects (consultant or employee or whatever) failed because of communication issues, not technical issues. Even when tech issues arise, there needs to be competent communication about the impact. Good communication - from all parties - is key. It's just that with full time employees I think many managers prefer to let things slide around longer.
jijoy 15y ago
Ohh man. Once you got a big brand board , you can charge hell for it. I mean , I know people working for 20-25$ and build better things.
bernardwilson 15y ago
I was expecting that to be a list of really, really expensive rates. That's actually pretty cheap.
dmor 15y ago
I was expecting it to be more
brc 15y ago
I need to charge people more for customisation and integration work. I suck at charging people money for hourly work.
rythie 15y ago
How did you get two urls in the title for this one?
- gala8y 15y ago
  Recently there were few (one for sure) postings with scribd.com listed in parenthesis and they had nothing to do with scribd (they were all pdf's if i remember correctly). This case sure is different - even stranger. Looks like HN script is behaving. edit: Fresh example from /newest list: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3190866 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3190866
  - jules 15y ago
    HN has been adding [scribd] links to pdfs for a very long time. Scribd is a YC startup.
    - gala8y 15y ago
      Roger that. (Am kinda new here.) Then, it looks like its uploading pdf to Scribd or looking for Scribd copy of a posted pdf ...or does something completely different. http://www.scribd.com/vacuum http://www.scribd.com/vacuum? sure sounds mystic. Anyway, not much to discuss.
      - waitwhat 15y ago
        I assume the script is called "vacuum" because it sucks in a url (and then displays it.)
- robinhouston 15y ago
  HN automatically adds a [scribd] link when a PDF is posted.
dantoomey 15y ago
I think these rates are low (and probably old). I worked for a systems integrator over 10 years ago and our bill rates for similar levels were higher.
tibbon 15y ago
It seems I'm the only one shocked at how much this is. Going up to $484/hr as I read it, seems out of the ballpark to me reasonability-wise. I'm sure they do a good job, but just like a lawyer that might charge that rate, high rates don't mean mistakes are never made. I'm pretty sure if I wanted to get a primary contributor to any open source database software to consult on a project, it would be far far less, and they'd know it just as well (if not better) than an Oracle consultant knows Oracle. I'm guessing the majority of these consultants don't touch the core code of the product that often. I guess I still haven't been properly explained the real value of Oracle yet. We use it at my dayjob, and every time I have to deal with it I am frustrated. Its so expensive, but why again is this significantly better than PostgreSQL?
- Vivtek 15y ago
  Your boss has heard of Larry Ellison and figures if he's so rich he must be doing something right. (Or your boss's boss, or whatever, depending on the size of your company.)
  - tibbon 15y ago
    That's about what it seems to come down to. I have yet to hear a compelling technical argument for Oracle aside from vague mentions like, "It's what an enterprise uses" or "It's so strong it could run X" But then I find that companies with huge datasets like Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, etc... don't use it. And I go back to scratching my head.
    - bmelton 15y ago
      There are two reasons most people use Oracle. In some cases, they have a product that requires it, and doesn't support anything else. If this product happens to be unique in the industry or core to their business, they will generally happily pay the Oracle tax and be done with it. The other good reason is that Oracle hires some of the very best sales people in the world, and nobody is selling postgres, mySQL, etc to the same extent. There's a huge difference between being a 'technically better' product and being able to convince a PHB of that. Also, Oracle tends to support damn near everything, and damn near everything (Enterprisey) supports Oracle. It's the 'safe' choice if you can afford it.
kbob 15y ago
I'd like to see the average salaries of the people providing this work. I expect most of them are in the range of $40-80 per hour (annualized), or about 20% of the total. If that number is right, the customer is paying 25% for the work, 25% for the overhead of the consulting company, and 50% for the Oracle brand.
- pilom 15y ago
  no that sounds about right. When you start consulting the recommended advice is triple your hourly rate. 1x to pay you, 2x to cover your benefits, and 3x to cover downtime between projects and when projects overrun. Consulting companies usually charge their customers 2.5-3x their consultants hourly fees.
xxiao 15y ago
wow, that's a lot more than an EE consultant can ever make.
shrikant 15y ago
Yeah these are either old, or special rates for US Federal Whatevers. I know quite a few senior (ish) consultants in Oracle who were billed at 3x this. It makes sense that they give the feds a different rate though - I would assume federal contracts last much longer than a lay customer (3x longer?).
- bmelton 15y ago
  I might be missing something, but the NY CIO is state, not federal. That said, while they likely have their products sold on some sort of GSA schedule, they're allowed relative carte blanche for their rates. That said, I doubt that this is far out of date, or far off the mark for what they charge as standard consulting fees based on recent work with both parties.
- alttag 15y ago
  It may just depend on how the contracts were structured. For example, in the OP, travel, room and board were billed separately. As you pointed out too, this contract was for 10 years, so there was probably a discount built in as part of a competitive bid.
dustingetz 15y ago
for the multiple comments like "omg that's outrageous!", this blog post will help understand the economics of consulting[1]. [1] http://blog.asmartbear.com/consulting-company-accounting.html
kahawe 15y ago
What actually is "outrageous" about those rates is what will ends up in the pocket of the poor sob who will be doing all the work... because it won't be an actual Oracle employee but very likely just some small contractor. I used to be a consultant working for a contractor for Sun (all big names in consulting do this, however. saves their hr costs) and Sun charged the customer about what you see on that card; the company I was working for, however, would end up getting about or less than half of that. All Sun was actually doing was providing a "project manager" I never saw and I didn't get remotely the kind of information and access to information that actual Sun techs would get and have. So ultimately they just sold their "good name" and passed on the work and kept the lion's share and when one of the projects went south (nobody effectively got the customer under control), they made sure all their contracts were water-tight and passed all the blame right down to us and we had to pay them back. Consulting is dirty, dirty business and you'll be swimming with sharks much, much bigger than you when working for the average small, highly effective and flexible IT company. And yes, you will sell your soul more often than you shall like.
suyash 15y ago
Staff Consultant - 1-3 yrs of experience and the rate is $220/hr in NY. Wow, I wish I had that job!

59 points by pwim 15y ago

rdl 15y ago

Those rates are about half of what I'd expect.

thepumpkin1979 15y ago
Yep, I'd like to see the rate card for SAP AG and compare hehe.
mgkimsal 15y ago
you don't know how long it takes them to do anything though. hourly rates are one thing, but unless they've got reasonable time frames for building stuff, it doesn't really matter. I typically charge 3-5x what 'regular' web developers do, and I catch flak for that from some potential clients. I also tend to get stuff done 5-10x faster than many other 'regular' web developers too, so I don't have any issues justifying myself. The people that care about hourly rates move on, the people that care about getting their problem solved quickly stay. I imagine Oracle's got 'standard' implementation timelines for common scenarios.
beedogs 15y ago
I don't see any date anywhere, though. Those rates could be from ten years ago.
- toyg 15y ago
  Comparing to current Euro rates (which I know), they look about right at today prices.

achille 15y ago

Also note the Oracle supplied GSA (Federal) price list: (see page 21) http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/pricing/gsa-pricelist-070605.pdf http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/pricing/gsa-pricelist-070... Which means that's the cheapest rate Oracle is allowed to give. By law.

jasonkester 15y ago

Seems quite reasonable. I sell a white label version of one of my products (Twiddla), with an API for integrating it into your site. From time to time I field requests from people who want to build their thing on top of our platform, asking if we do consulting. I tell them yes, then quote what it would take to build what they want and 90% of them have a heart attack on the spot. "But we have this quote from another developer saying he can do the whole thing for $1,500!" I don't doubt it. But then I suspect his dev didn't build Twiddla. I did, so I charge accordingly. I recommend having your own team do your integration since really it's quite straightforward, but if you really need it to work right and you need it fast, you can go straight to the source (but it'll cost you.) It's the same thing with Oracle. Sure you can find a guy to build your thing for $25/hr, and chances are he'll probably even do a good job. But if you want to remove all the "probably's" from that sentence you can pay 10x as much and have Oracle do it for you.

16s 15y ago
I've had some bad experience with consultants. So much so that I'm hesitant to use them now. They'll have a plane to catch to fly to the next client's site. And they'll rush to catch that plane and make mistakes on your project, etc. They have the mentality that this is "not their baby". If you do hire one, make sure you have a maintenance agreement with them so they can't just set it and forget it leaving you with a big bill and problems. Just my experience. Edit: I've never used an Oracle consultant. My comment is meant at technical consultants in general.
- mgkimsal 15y ago
  And I've had bad experiences with clients who want to treat an external consultant as just another body they don't have to treat any differently with respect to communication. There's pitfalls on both sides, but I've had people not give me information for 3 weeks, fiddling with other projects, then get upset, after our initial agreed on engagement timeframe is done, when they can't just have me stay involved for another month. I've said before, and I'll say it again - almost all projects I've been involved with that failed or were extremely bad projects (consultant or employee or whatever) failed because of communication issues, not technical issues. Even when tech issues arise, there needs to be competent communication about the impact. Good communication - from all parties - is key. It's just that with full time employees I think many managers prefer to let things slide around longer.

jijoy 15y ago

Ohh man. Once you got a big brand board , you can charge hell for it. I mean , I know people working for 20-25$ and build better things.

bernardwilson 15y ago

I was expecting that to be a list of really, really expensive rates. That's actually pretty cheap.

dmor 15y ago

I was expecting it to be more

brc 15y ago

I need to charge people more for customisation and integration work. I suck at charging people money for hourly work.

rythie 15y ago

How did you get two urls in the title for this one?

gala8y 15y ago
Recently there were few (one for sure) postings with scribd.com listed in parenthesis and they had nothing to do with scribd (they were all pdf's if i remember correctly). This case sure is different - even stranger. Looks like HN script is behaving. edit: Fresh example from /newest list: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3190866 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3190866
- jules 15y ago
  HN has been adding [scribd] links to pdfs for a very long time. Scribd is a YC startup.
  - gala8y 15y ago
    Roger that. (Am kinda new here.) Then, it looks like its uploading pdf to Scribd or looking for Scribd copy of a posted pdf ...or does something completely different. http://www.scribd.com/vacuum http://www.scribd.com/vacuum? sure sounds mystic. Anyway, not much to discuss.
    - waitwhat 15y ago
      I assume the script is called "vacuum" because it sucks in a url (and then displays it.)
robinhouston 15y ago
HN automatically adds a [scribd] link when a PDF is posted.

dantoomey 15y ago

I think these rates are low (and probably old). I worked for a systems integrator over 10 years ago and our bill rates for similar levels were higher.

tibbon 15y ago

It seems I'm the only one shocked at how much this is. Going up to $484/hr as I read it, seems out of the ballpark to me reasonability-wise. I'm sure they do a good job, but just like a lawyer that might charge that rate, high rates don't mean mistakes are never made. I'm pretty sure if I wanted to get a primary contributor to any open source database software to consult on a project, it would be far far less, and they'd know it just as well (if not better) than an Oracle consultant knows Oracle. I'm guessing the majority of these consultants don't touch the core code of the product that often. I guess I still haven't been properly explained the real value of Oracle yet. We use it at my dayjob, and every time I have to deal with it I am frustrated. Its so expensive, but why again is this significantly better than PostgreSQL?

Vivtek 15y ago
Your boss has heard of Larry Ellison and figures if he's so rich he must be doing something right. (Or your boss's boss, or whatever, depending on the size of your company.)
- tibbon 15y ago
  That's about what it seems to come down to. I have yet to hear a compelling technical argument for Oracle aside from vague mentions like, "It's what an enterprise uses" or "It's so strong it could run X" But then I find that companies with huge datasets like Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, etc... don't use it. And I go back to scratching my head.
  - bmelton 15y ago
    There are two reasons most people use Oracle. In some cases, they have a product that requires it, and doesn't support anything else. If this product happens to be unique in the industry or core to their business, they will generally happily pay the Oracle tax and be done with it. The other good reason is that Oracle hires some of the very best sales people in the world, and nobody is selling postgres, mySQL, etc to the same extent. There's a huge difference between being a 'technically better' product and being able to convince a PHB of that. Also, Oracle tends to support damn near everything, and damn near everything (Enterprisey) supports Oracle. It's the 'safe' choice if you can afford it.

kbob 15y ago

I'd like to see the average salaries of the people providing this work. I expect most of them are in the range of $40-80 per hour (annualized), or about 20% of the total. If that number is right, the customer is paying 25% for the work, 25% for the overhead of the consulting company, and 50% for the Oracle brand.

pilom 15y ago
no that sounds about right. When you start consulting the recommended advice is triple your hourly rate. 1x to pay you, 2x to cover your benefits, and 3x to cover downtime between projects and when projects overrun. Consulting companies usually charge their customers 2.5-3x their consultants hourly fees.

xxiao 15y ago

wow, that's a lot more than an EE consultant can ever make.

shrikant 15y ago

Yeah these are either old, or special rates for US Federal Whatevers. I know quite a few senior (ish) consultants in Oracle who were billed at 3x this. It makes sense that they give the feds a different rate though - I would assume federal contracts last much longer than a lay customer (3x longer?).

bmelton 15y ago
I might be missing something, but the NY CIO is state, not federal. That said, while they likely have their products sold on some sort of GSA schedule, they're allowed relative carte blanche for their rates. That said, I doubt that this is far out of date, or far off the mark for what they charge as standard consulting fees based on recent work with both parties.
alttag 15y ago
It may just depend on how the contracts were structured. For example, in the OP, travel, room and board were billed separately. As you pointed out too, this contract was for 10 years, so there was probably a discount built in as part of a competitive bid.

dustingetz 15y ago

for the multiple comments like "omg that's outrageous!", this blog post will help understand the economics of consulting[1]. [1] http://blog.asmartbear.com/consulting-company-accounting.html

kahawe 15y ago

What actually is "outrageous" about those rates is what will ends up in the pocket of the poor sob who will be doing all the work... because it won't be an actual Oracle employee but very likely just some small contractor. I used to be a consultant working for a contractor for Sun (all big names in consulting do this, however. saves their hr costs) and Sun charged the customer about what you see on that card; the company I was working for, however, would end up getting about or less than half of that. All Sun was actually doing was providing a "project manager" I never saw and I didn't get remotely the kind of information and access to information that actual Sun techs would get and have. So ultimately they just sold their "good name" and passed on the work and kept the lion's share and when one of the projects went south (nobody effectively got the customer under control), they made sure all their contracts were water-tight and passed all the blame right down to us and we had to pay them back. Consulting is dirty, dirty business and you'll be swimming with sharks much, much bigger than you when working for the average small, highly effective and flexible IT company. And yes, you will sell your soul more often than you shall like.

suyash 15y ago

Staff Consultant - 1-3 yrs of experience and the rate is $220/hr in NY. Wow, I wish I had that job!