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A number of reasons that form an important lesson in sales at the enterprise level: 1. Oracle does provide value. They have clustering and high-availability of

by donw 11y ago

A number of reasons that form an important lesson in sales at the enterprise level: 1. Oracle does provide value. They have clustering and high-availability offerings that Postgres just can't touch, and those come with service and support personnel as part of the contract. A one-stop solution is a powerful sales pitch. 2. They have a massive existing install base within the Fortune 500, which spend amounts of money that the average hacker just can't grasp. Somebody that I know very recently worked on an enterprise project to create more-or-less a web page that had a $1,000,000 budget. Oracle is not asking for unreasonable amounts of money, by enterprise standards. 3. Companies value safety over risk, and Oracle has a long track record at the executive level of providing safety. The mindset goes something like: Postgres might be good enough for Imgur or Joe Bob's Bait Shack And Social Network, but neither of those is a bank, healthcare provider, or an entity capable of ordering an air strike. Oracle is telling the story their customers want to hear. 4. Because Oracle has such a large install base and so many success stories at the enterprise level, they are one of a very few number of default choices that an enterprise will make. They have spent decades building up sales momentum. Business decisions usually have very little do to with the underlaying technology.

chatmasta 11y ago
> Companies value safety over risk Yes. In the case of a database, "safety" is safety from downtime, data loss, data theft. So companies want a database that is fault tolerant and secure. > Postgres might be good enough for Imgur or Joe Bob's Bait Shack And Social Network, but neither of those is a bank, healthcare provider, or an entity capable of ordering an air strike. Banks and healthcare providers strike me as far more insecure than tech companies, and especially more insecure than the large computing platforms like EC2, Google Cloud, etc. Any cloud can host a postgres database, and many of them offer database-specific services. Oracle is competing not just with Postgres, but with literally every other database offering, many from leading tech companies. The cloud extracts value by utility billing a large customer base. Oracle extracts value by overbilling a small customer base. Which model seems more sustainable? Eventually EC2, Google Cloud, etc will overtake Oracle completely. Maybe if Oracle is lucky they can provide the overpriced consultants to manage their client's EC2 boxes.
- smtddr 11y ago
  6 years of AT&T under my belt, Enterprise operates differently. They don't care about what postgres or EC2 or whatever can do, it's all about not doing anything that someone can point a finger at you for later. Nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM, Oracle or Microsoft. Also, companies that supply software to corps also supply something that's probably more valuable than the software itself. Support & Maintenance agreements. The fact that if anything goes wrong they can call up a phone number and immediately have a consultant($200+/hr) show up at the corp's location and troubleshoot the problem is a lot of accountability they don't have to directly absorb. There's also PCI compliance and just general fear of new things. Accountability/blame is the name of the game. You want that value for yourself to be zero unless you get privileged info that the project has succeeded before everyone else finds out, in which case you then scramble to get your name on any documents or email chains related to said project so you can claim it was all due to your planning & decision-making. I've seen this happen several times and was personally burned hard by people I thought were my friends back in 2006. I'm still bitter about it. I will not let that happen to me again. And I know it happened because I didn't properly document what I was doing and why. Or maybe, I just shouldn't have done it at all and just sit back and watch everyone else panic and burn.... whatever. It was my first job out of college, I was naive.
  - chatmasta 11y ago
    Nothing about EC2 precludes it from offloading accountability from its clients to itself. Amazon operates infrastructure for the CIA. Consultants are plentiful and cheap. Amazon can provide handholding-as-a-Service just as well as Oracle. At some point, Amazon may invest more resources into its service business. But now it makes sense to grow its platform. That is the difference in Amazon vs Oracle model. Amazon is platform first, Oracle is service first. When Amazon competes with Oracle on service, what value will Oracle have to provide? Amazon is far ahead of them in platform, and catching up in service is easy. Oracle would have a much harder time doing the opposite. Platform-first business model is quickly displacing service-first business model. Build a large customer base, use it as proof of ability to scale, then charge enterprise customers for concierge service. EDIT: keep in mind we are discussing an article about oracle's declining sales.
blinkingled 11y ago
Exactly right. They have a really good product with great reputation, a ton of support resources and skill availability. Besides the features like RAC, RAT, Various security stuff (redaction, encryption etc) that enterprise customers demand are not in any open source database I know of.
needusername 11y ago
> Oracle does provide value. I don't know why people always mention clustering. It provides so many downsides and complications that it hardly ever seems worth it. I don't know my people never mention instrumentation, monitoring and plan management. These things are there you help you when you need them.
- saiya-jin 11y ago
  is it more complicated? yes. is it completely mandatory for many types of bigger corps? but of course. not that the topics you mention are not important part of equation :)
datashovel 11y ago
Historically speaking I would agree. Oracle, at one point in history, did offer a compelling value proposition. I attribute their slow but inevitable death to a slow learning curve in Fortune 500 companies. Also I imagine they're likely involved in a large number of government contracts.
pjc50 11y ago
Somebody that I know very recently worked on an enterprise project to create more-or-less a web page that had a $1,000,000 budget. This is uncomfortably close to the truth, and the reason why government procurement projects often overrun so badly with so much spent is that the budget is set high in the first place. This creates an opportunity to pile on consultants and complexity which can all be billed for. The size of the budget determines the size of the solution, not the other way round.

by donw 11y ago

chatmasta 11y ago

> Companies value safety over risk Yes. In the case of a database, "safety" is safety from downtime, data loss, data theft. So companies want a database that is fault tolerant and secure. > Postgres might be good enough for Imgur or Joe Bob's Bait Shack And Social Network, but neither of those is a bank, healthcare provider, or an entity capable of ordering an air strike. Banks and healthcare providers strike me as far more insecure than tech companies, and especially more insecure than the large computing platforms like EC2, Google Cloud, etc. Any cloud can host a postgres database, and many of them offer database-specific services. Oracle is competing not just with Postgres, but with literally every other database offering, many from leading tech companies. The cloud extracts value by utility billing a large customer base. Oracle extracts value by overbilling a small customer base. Which model seems more sustainable? Eventually EC2, Google Cloud, etc will overtake Oracle completely. Maybe if Oracle is lucky they can provide the overpriced consultants to manage their client's EC2 boxes.

smtddr 11y ago
6 years of AT&T under my belt, Enterprise operates differently. They don't care about what postgres or EC2 or whatever can do, it's all about not doing anything that someone can point a finger at you for later. Nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM, Oracle or Microsoft. Also, companies that supply software to corps also supply something that's probably more valuable than the software itself. Support & Maintenance agreements. The fact that if anything goes wrong they can call up a phone number and immediately have a consultant($200+/hr) show up at the corp's location and troubleshoot the problem is a lot of accountability they don't have to directly absorb. There's also PCI compliance and just general fear of new things. Accountability/blame is the name of the game. You want that value for yourself to be zero unless you get privileged info that the project has succeeded before everyone else finds out, in which case you then scramble to get your name on any documents or email chains related to said project so you can claim it was all due to your planning & decision-making. I've seen this happen several times and was personally burned hard by people I thought were my friends back in 2006. I'm still bitter about it. I will not let that happen to me again. And I know it happened because I didn't properly document what I was doing and why. Or maybe, I just shouldn't have done it at all and just sit back and watch everyone else panic and burn.... whatever. It was my first job out of college, I was naive.
- chatmasta 11y ago
  Nothing about EC2 precludes it from offloading accountability from its clients to itself. Amazon operates infrastructure for the CIA. Consultants are plentiful and cheap. Amazon can provide handholding-as-a-Service just as well as Oracle. At some point, Amazon may invest more resources into its service business. But now it makes sense to grow its platform. That is the difference in Amazon vs Oracle model. Amazon is platform first, Oracle is service first. When Amazon competes with Oracle on service, what value will Oracle have to provide? Amazon is far ahead of them in platform, and catching up in service is easy. Oracle would have a much harder time doing the opposite. Platform-first business model is quickly displacing service-first business model. Build a large customer base, use it as proof of ability to scale, then charge enterprise customers for concierge service. EDIT: keep in mind we are discussing an article about oracle's declining sales.

blinkingled 11y ago

Exactly right. They have a really good product with great reputation, a ton of support resources and skill availability. Besides the features like RAC, RAT, Various security stuff (redaction, encryption etc) that enterprise customers demand are not in any open source database I know of.

needusername 11y ago

> Oracle does provide value. I don't know why people always mention clustering. It provides so many downsides and complications that it hardly ever seems worth it. I don't know my people never mention instrumentation, monitoring and plan management. These things are there you help you when you need them.

saiya-jin 11y ago
is it more complicated? yes. is it completely mandatory for many types of bigger corps? but of course. not that the topics you mention are not important part of equation :)

datashovel 11y ago

Historically speaking I would agree. Oracle, at one point in history, did offer a compelling value proposition. I attribute their slow but inevitable death to a slow learning curve in Fortune 500 companies. Also I imagine they're likely involved in a large number of government contracts.

pjc50 11y ago

Somebody that I know very recently worked on an enterprise project to create more-or-less a web page that had a $1,000,000 budget. This is uncomfortably close to the truth, and the reason why government procurement projects often overrun so badly with so much spent is that the budget is set high in the first place. This creates an opportunity to pile on consultants and complexity which can all be billed for. The size of the budget determines the size of the solution, not the other way round.