6 ms·

Oracle has bigger problems than OpenAI. They've been selling large enterprise contracts for the past 10 years and they're coming up for renewal. A lot of those

by taylodl 10mo ago

Oracle has bigger problems than OpenAI. They've been selling large enterprise contracts for the past 10 years and they're coming up for renewal. A lot of those enterprises don't feel they got a good value. If 10% to 20% of those enterprises fail to renew for another 10 years, then that could have a severe impact to Oracle. Their other issue is a lot of those enterprises are looking at migrating to PostgreSQL so they can migrate off of Oracle's RDBMS. Many have already deployed PostgreSQL for their department-level applications, so they can get the experience they need before tackling their enterprise-level applications.

OccamsMirror 10mo ago
Can confirm. There is zero good will towards Oracle in my organization, and AWS have positioned themselves in a way to push the enterprise team to using PostgreSQL on RDS, and helping development teams make the move with training and proservices. Oracle's greed is finally coming back to haunt them.
- adabyron 10mo ago
  But how hard is it for your companies to migrate? Is it worth the risk/work to move everything over? For a lot of enterprises, their needs to be a huge cost savings or risk reduction. Risk usually being the most important factor the bigger the company.
  - zamadatix 10mo ago
    If it's the same for others as it was for us recently then very difficult... but the cost savings were so massive in terms of margin the risk was worth it. What taylodl mentioned about growing institutional knowledge and experience with Postgres in other apps first rang true as well. We are not 100% Oracle free, but we have migrated much away already. In the larger discussion, I also wonder what their new contract rate is for these solutions. Even if 0% were migrating off, if 0% were migrating on then the net rate would still be decently negative because of natural business/app attrition.
  - hylaride 10mo ago
    I know of one largish bank moving away from Oracle middleware and RDMS. It's happening in pieces starting with low hanging fruit and for awhile the two will run in parallel (with the new data stores starting off as a comparison check to reconcile any bugs that crop up). Some early wins were account transaction logs that can go into better suited DBs, etc. My understanding is that they were relatively lucky in that most of the hard parts are in the middleware layer and rarely the DB itself - the bank has been around since the 1800s, so has a huge mishmash of technologies that go from old IBM mainframes up to more modern cloud infra. So they're already kind of used to using middleware logic to stitch together various data sources. The funny thing is that my contact there said the primary impetus is that they see the writing on the wall for a lot of their "legacy" Sun hardware, and figure if they're going to have to redo a lot of it, they may as well re-architect the rest. There'll still be oracle DBs running in the bank for a looong time, but there'll be less and less of it.
- cameldrv 10mo ago
  "Do not fall into the trap of anthropomorphizing Larry Ellison" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc?t=2300 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc?t=2300
  - Malic 10mo ago
    Evergreen :)
  - throw0101a 10mo ago
    > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc?t=2300 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc?t=2300 Working: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=2300s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=2300s ~38ms0s
thedougd 10mo ago
In my organization we've worked hard for several years to insulate ourselves from Oracle. We've implemented aggressive desktop monitoring and blocked downloads from Oracle to avoid the Java subscription. Where it's needed, an OpenJDK distribution is used. Where we must still use Oracle database, in some small, bespoke legacy use cases (heavy PL/SQL), we've moved to RDS with license included to avoid the direct relationship with Oracle. I get it, a big RAC customer will have a harder time, but they'll also likely have alternatives (e.g. SAP implementation to HANA). I know of at least one vendor (Hyland) who's dropping Oracle support and providing a migration path to MS SQL. Shame not a FOSS database, but still a trend away from Oracle.
- panarky 10mo ago
  I watched from the sidelines with grim interest as my organization tried to decide between Oracle and SAP. The team defined requirements, ran an RFP and demo process and did site visits to clients of each company. The SAP reference clients weren't exactly thrilled with SAP, the product was too complex and too expensive, but it was rock solid and SAP was a reliable partner. The Oracle reference clients had the usual complaints about features and flexibility, but their real beefs were that Oracle was a predatory and untrustworthy partner. Oracle made claims in their RFP response that were proven false in the demos and site visits, confirming the claims from reference clients about the company's ethics. In contrast, SAP's RFP responses were validated by the team's due diligence. So management decided to go with SAP. In response, a senior Oracle person tracked down all of the company's board members and made outrageous claims of incompetence against the company's executives, and alluded ominously about bad faith and conflicts of interest. Oracle was completely hostile and off the rails when they figured out they lost the deal. I will never, ever do business with Oracle. Unfortunately, while the SAP application seemed solid, the organization went with their HANA database which was astronomically expensive, and had a bad habit of returning different and provably incorrect results to the same deterministic SQL query every time it ran, and then the entire database would crash for all users.
  - jiggawatts 10mo ago
    You’re going to have to elaborate on that last bit! SAP HANA is used by enormous organisations as the core database for their entire operations, so pervasive data corruption bugs would be rather… concerning.
otterley 10mo ago
Aren’t contract expiration dates distributed over time? Why would now be a particularly vulnerable time? Granted, we’re coming up on the end of the calendar year, but 2025 doesn’t feel particularly special.
- foobarian 10mo ago
  Also, how does one come upon these kinds of bits of industry lore? Asking for a daytrader friend. Ahem
  - cj 10mo ago
    I've found the only stocks where I can personally be successful stock picking are companies I have some sort of unique relationship or experience with that is uncommon or unavailable to sophisticated investors or analysts. E.g. you're an IT admin at Big Co overseeing software contracts. You can often get interesting insights by looking at things like how aggressive their sales reps are with end of quarter discounts (how desperate are they to meet numbers that quarter?). Or if you see a company completely dropping the ball within your org, but on CNBC you constantly hear how great the company is by pundits and analysts -- maybe you know something the pundits don't. Often times the consensus view of a stock trails reality by a few weeks to a month - there's a lot of non-public but also non-confidential information that isn't readily available to analysts, but exposed to employees of customers/vendors/partners/end-users. TLDR: when stock picking or day trading, pick companies within the niche of the world where you're a SME.
    - smallnix 10mo ago
      TL;DR: inside trading /s
      - prepend 10mo ago
        That’s not insider trading. It’s using nonpublic information, legally. The example that my business school professor gave was that if you’re riding in an elevator with two executives and they talk about how they’re going to miss numbers and trade it’s not insider. If one of them tells you specifically, it is.
lateforwork 10mo ago
> If 10% to 20% of those enterprises fail to renew for another 10 years Think about how hard it would be for you to switch from iPhone to Android. Now multiply that by 10000. That's how hard it is to switch enterprise software.
- collingreen 10mo ago
  Now imagine you save $10M a year doing it
  - jt2190 10mo ago
    Why would any Enterprise Software vendor leave $10M on the table?
    - boringg 10mo ago
      Lack of capability, mismanagement, misinformation to name a few
    - esafak 10mo ago
      Because vendors are not fungible in the eyes of the buyer.
    - arjie 10mo ago
      Just not that straightforward in practice. You have all of these product lines that people are building that you're hoping will grow the business. They all depend on your backend stuff that's just an implementation detail. You have to somehow convince everyone across the org to stall their product development to perform a "migrate to Postgres" thing? It's not going to be easy. There was a recent big company that posted on Twitter about "shutting down our last Oracle server" and that was the last thing in a multi-year process or something like that. Coordination is sometimes harder than the technology itself.
      - jt2190 10mo ago
        The assertion was that switching vendors would save $10M. I asked why the new vendor would forego $10M that the old vendor was able to collect. Are you saying that the new vendor has to offer this discount otherwise there’s no incentive to migrate? (I agree that migrating is very difficult politically.)
justapassenger 10mo ago
Oracle has been selling large enterprise contracts for many decades and those enterprises were looking to migrate off Oracle since then too (I've been working on a project like that almost 20 years ago, at my first real job).
websiteapi 10mo ago
Sources for any of these claims?
moralestapia 10mo ago
>In business since 1977. >Market cap of half a trillion. >Somehow they're "in trouble". Mega LMAO.
- SvenL 10mo ago
  There are enough examples which one might mention here: Nokia, MySpace, Yahoo, Kodac, AOL, Blockbuster, toys‘r‘us … all ones big. Yes, oracle might not vanish, but it definitely needs some change.
  - moralestapia 10mo ago
    ??? None of those were in business since 1977 (w/ the exception of Nokia, which I would argue is still a successful company today. I wouldn't put it on that list). None of those were ever valued (even close to) half a trillion, even adjusting for inflation.
    - SvenL 10mo ago
      Your first point is correct, they are not that old. And while Nokia is still a company, it does not have the market power it once had. And that's what I meant with it might not vanish - Oracle will still be a company. Still, I think age is not really a good metric for success. Your second point is right on the spot! Its valued. By what? By others, right? Somebody says a company has a value, which might not reflect its worth. As mentioned by some other commenters, Oracle has a lot of competition. Good competition. That's why I wrote it needs to change in order to stay competitive.
      - moralestapia 10mo ago
        >Its valued. By what? By others, right? Somebody says a company has a value, which might not reflect its worth. Is this news to anyone in here?
    - taylodl 10mo ago
      Kodak was founded in 1892. I think Oracle is going to go the way of HP. Look at HP over the past 10 years and what it had been in the 10 year period leading up to that. Sure, HP is still a company with $50+ billion in revenue, which actually matches where Oracle is today, but they had been a company with $100+ billion in revenue - and that's before adjusting for inflation. So while it's hard to call a company with $50+ billion in revenue a failure, they're not nearly what they once were. That's the direction I see Oracle going. https://stockanalysis.com/stocks/hpq/revenue/ https://stockanalysis.com/stocks/hpq/revenue/
kev009 10mo ago
Probably nobody here is an Oracle fan but the miss on sentiment like this is you could have written the same comment minus OpenAI 10 and maybe even 20 years ago.
- jl6 10mo ago
  Definitely true, but a lot of Oracle sites are that way because of decisions made decades ago. Opportunities to re-architect are rare. But when those opportunities do come along, nobody is choosing Oracle RDBMS for their future state. What I do see is orgs choosing other Oracle apps like ERP which sneak the Oracle RDBMS in as part of the bundle. Anyone using Oracle purely as a database is going to migrate to PostgreSQL eventually, but there are a lot of orgs where the database is just one part of a wider Oracle ecosystem with world-class vendor lock-in features.
  - kev009 10mo ago
    They have some funny accounting like Google and Microsoft where everything is "cloud" but the revenue streams are certainly diversified from straight Oracle DB such that PostgreSQL equivalence or superiority does not affect the viability of the company or the stock price. Communities like this often over index technical and personal opinion with reality. I worked at a midsize that was core internet infra, where we had an in house OS and ODM hardware and FOSS DBAs. The one Oracle DB and Oracle HW was slipped in the door through finance for ERP as you say. Although I suspect that would be cloud hosted these days.
bdangubic 10mo ago
I read very similar comments … 10-15 years ago
mbesto 10mo ago
Oracle's growth and value is in SaaS apps (NetSuite) and their cloud offering, not DB licensing. The economic impact of enterprises moving off Oracle DB is massively overstated here.

by taylodl 10mo ago

OccamsMirror 10mo ago

Can confirm. There is zero good will towards Oracle in my organization, and AWS have positioned themselves in a way to push the enterprise team to using PostgreSQL on RDS, and helping development teams make the move with training and proservices. Oracle's greed is finally coming back to haunt them.

adabyron 10mo ago
But how hard is it for your companies to migrate? Is it worth the risk/work to move everything over? For a lot of enterprises, their needs to be a huge cost savings or risk reduction. Risk usually being the most important factor the bigger the company.
- zamadatix 10mo ago
  If it's the same for others as it was for us recently then very difficult... but the cost savings were so massive in terms of margin the risk was worth it. What taylodl mentioned about growing institutional knowledge and experience with Postgres in other apps first rang true as well. We are not 100% Oracle free, but we have migrated much away already. In the larger discussion, I also wonder what their new contract rate is for these solutions. Even if 0% were migrating off, if 0% were migrating on then the net rate would still be decently negative because of natural business/app attrition.
- hylaride 10mo ago
  I know of one largish bank moving away from Oracle middleware and RDMS. It's happening in pieces starting with low hanging fruit and for awhile the two will run in parallel (with the new data stores starting off as a comparison check to reconcile any bugs that crop up). Some early wins were account transaction logs that can go into better suited DBs, etc. My understanding is that they were relatively lucky in that most of the hard parts are in the middleware layer and rarely the DB itself - the bank has been around since the 1800s, so has a huge mishmash of technologies that go from old IBM mainframes up to more modern cloud infra. So they're already kind of used to using middleware logic to stitch together various data sources. The funny thing is that my contact there said the primary impetus is that they see the writing on the wall for a lot of their "legacy" Sun hardware, and figure if they're going to have to redo a lot of it, they may as well re-architect the rest. There'll still be oracle DBs running in the bank for a looong time, but there'll be less and less of it.
cameldrv 10mo ago
"Do not fall into the trap of anthropomorphizing Larry Ellison" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc?t=2300 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc?t=2300
- Malic 10mo ago
  Evergreen :)
- throw0101a 10mo ago
  > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc?t=2300 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc?t=2300 Working: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=2300s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=2300s ~38ms0s

thedougd 10mo ago

In my organization we've worked hard for several years to insulate ourselves from Oracle. We've implemented aggressive desktop monitoring and blocked downloads from Oracle to avoid the Java subscription. Where it's needed, an OpenJDK distribution is used. Where we must still use Oracle database, in some small, bespoke legacy use cases (heavy PL/SQL), we've moved to RDS with license included to avoid the direct relationship with Oracle. I get it, a big RAC customer will have a harder time, but they'll also likely have alternatives (e.g. SAP implementation to HANA). I know of at least one vendor (Hyland) who's dropping Oracle support and providing a migration path to MS SQL. Shame not a FOSS database, but still a trend away from Oracle.

panarky 10mo ago
I watched from the sidelines with grim interest as my organization tried to decide between Oracle and SAP. The team defined requirements, ran an RFP and demo process and did site visits to clients of each company. The SAP reference clients weren't exactly thrilled with SAP, the product was too complex and too expensive, but it was rock solid and SAP was a reliable partner. The Oracle reference clients had the usual complaints about features and flexibility, but their real beefs were that Oracle was a predatory and untrustworthy partner. Oracle made claims in their RFP response that were proven false in the demos and site visits, confirming the claims from reference clients about the company's ethics. In contrast, SAP's RFP responses were validated by the team's due diligence. So management decided to go with SAP. In response, a senior Oracle person tracked down all of the company's board members and made outrageous claims of incompetence against the company's executives, and alluded ominously about bad faith and conflicts of interest. Oracle was completely hostile and off the rails when they figured out they lost the deal. I will never, ever do business with Oracle. Unfortunately, while the SAP application seemed solid, the organization went with their HANA database which was astronomically expensive, and had a bad habit of returning different and provably incorrect results to the same deterministic SQL query every time it ran, and then the entire database would crash for all users.
- jiggawatts 10mo ago
  You’re going to have to elaborate on that last bit! SAP HANA is used by enormous organisations as the core database for their entire operations, so pervasive data corruption bugs would be rather… concerning.

otterley 10mo ago

Aren’t contract expiration dates distributed over time? Why would now be a particularly vulnerable time? Granted, we’re coming up on the end of the calendar year, but 2025 doesn’t feel particularly special.

foobarian 10mo ago
Also, how does one come upon these kinds of bits of industry lore? Asking for a daytrader friend. Ahem
- cj 10mo ago
  I've found the only stocks where I can personally be successful stock picking are companies I have some sort of unique relationship or experience with that is uncommon or unavailable to sophisticated investors or analysts. E.g. you're an IT admin at Big Co overseeing software contracts. You can often get interesting insights by looking at things like how aggressive their sales reps are with end of quarter discounts (how desperate are they to meet numbers that quarter?). Or if you see a company completely dropping the ball within your org, but on CNBC you constantly hear how great the company is by pundits and analysts -- maybe you know something the pundits don't. Often times the consensus view of a stock trails reality by a few weeks to a month - there's a lot of non-public but also non-confidential information that isn't readily available to analysts, but exposed to employees of customers/vendors/partners/end-users. TLDR: when stock picking or day trading, pick companies within the niche of the world where you're a SME.
  - smallnix 10mo ago
    TL;DR: inside trading /s
    - prepend 10mo ago
      That’s not insider trading. It’s using nonpublic information, legally. The example that my business school professor gave was that if you’re riding in an elevator with two executives and they talk about how they’re going to miss numbers and trade it’s not insider. If one of them tells you specifically, it is.

lateforwork 10mo ago

> If 10% to 20% of those enterprises fail to renew for another 10 years Think about how hard it would be for you to switch from iPhone to Android. Now multiply that by 10000. That's how hard it is to switch enterprise software.

collingreen 10mo ago
Now imagine you save $10M a year doing it
- jt2190 10mo ago
  Why would any Enterprise Software vendor leave $10M on the table?
  - boringg 10mo ago
    Lack of capability, mismanagement, misinformation to name a few
  - esafak 10mo ago
    Because vendors are not fungible in the eyes of the buyer.
  - arjie 10mo ago
    Just not that straightforward in practice. You have all of these product lines that people are building that you're hoping will grow the business. They all depend on your backend stuff that's just an implementation detail. You have to somehow convince everyone across the org to stall their product development to perform a "migrate to Postgres" thing? It's not going to be easy. There was a recent big company that posted on Twitter about "shutting down our last Oracle server" and that was the last thing in a multi-year process or something like that. Coordination is sometimes harder than the technology itself.
    - jt2190 10mo ago
      The assertion was that switching vendors would save $10M. I asked why the new vendor would forego $10M that the old vendor was able to collect. Are you saying that the new vendor has to offer this discount otherwise there’s no incentive to migrate? (I agree that migrating is very difficult politically.)

justapassenger 10mo ago

Oracle has been selling large enterprise contracts for many decades and those enterprises were looking to migrate off Oracle since then too (I've been working on a project like that almost 20 years ago, at my first real job).

websiteapi 10mo ago

Sources for any of these claims?

moralestapia 10mo ago

>In business since 1977. >Market cap of half a trillion. >Somehow they're "in trouble". Mega LMAO.

SvenL 10mo ago
There are enough examples which one might mention here: Nokia, MySpace, Yahoo, Kodac, AOL, Blockbuster, toys‘r‘us … all ones big. Yes, oracle might not vanish, but it definitely needs some change.
- moralestapia 10mo ago
  ??? None of those were in business since 1977 (w/ the exception of Nokia, which I would argue is still a successful company today. I wouldn't put it on that list). None of those were ever valued (even close to) half a trillion, even adjusting for inflation.
  - SvenL 10mo ago
    Your first point is correct, they are not that old. And while Nokia is still a company, it does not have the market power it once had. And that's what I meant with it might not vanish - Oracle will still be a company. Still, I think age is not really a good metric for success. Your second point is right on the spot! Its valued. By what? By others, right? Somebody says a company has a value, which might not reflect its worth. As mentioned by some other commenters, Oracle has a lot of competition. Good competition. That's why I wrote it needs to change in order to stay competitive.
    - moralestapia 10mo ago
      >Its valued. By what? By others, right? Somebody says a company has a value, which might not reflect its worth. Is this news to anyone in here?
  - taylodl 10mo ago
    Kodak was founded in 1892. I think Oracle is going to go the way of HP. Look at HP over the past 10 years and what it had been in the 10 year period leading up to that. Sure, HP is still a company with $50+ billion in revenue, which actually matches where Oracle is today, but they had been a company with $100+ billion in revenue - and that's before adjusting for inflation. So while it's hard to call a company with $50+ billion in revenue a failure, they're not nearly what they once were. That's the direction I see Oracle going. https://stockanalysis.com/stocks/hpq/revenue/ https://stockanalysis.com/stocks/hpq/revenue/

kev009 10mo ago

Probably nobody here is an Oracle fan but the miss on sentiment like this is you could have written the same comment minus OpenAI 10 and maybe even 20 years ago.

jl6 10mo ago
Definitely true, but a lot of Oracle sites are that way because of decisions made decades ago. Opportunities to re-architect are rare. But when those opportunities do come along, nobody is choosing Oracle RDBMS for their future state. What I do see is orgs choosing other Oracle apps like ERP which sneak the Oracle RDBMS in as part of the bundle. Anyone using Oracle purely as a database is going to migrate to PostgreSQL eventually, but there are a lot of orgs where the database is just one part of a wider Oracle ecosystem with world-class vendor lock-in features.
- kev009 10mo ago
  They have some funny accounting like Google and Microsoft where everything is "cloud" but the revenue streams are certainly diversified from straight Oracle DB such that PostgreSQL equivalence or superiority does not affect the viability of the company or the stock price. Communities like this often over index technical and personal opinion with reality. I worked at a midsize that was core internet infra, where we had an in house OS and ODM hardware and FOSS DBAs. The one Oracle DB and Oracle HW was slipped in the door through finance for ERP as you say. Although I suspect that would be cloud hosted these days.

bdangubic 10mo ago

I read very similar comments … 10-15 years ago

mbesto 10mo ago

Oracle's growth and value is in SaaS apps (NetSuite) and their cloud offering, not DB licensing. The economic impact of enterprises moving off Oracle DB is massively overstated here.