"...indicating trouble in acquiring new customers"
"Now then Mr Customer, why don't you place you balls in our lovely corporate vice?"
"Smithers, why are they going elsewhere?"
Oracle's shares dropped sharply after the database giant reported results that – yet again – missed analysts' expectations. Ellison & Co. reported revenues of $11.32bn and an earnings-per-share (EPS) of $0.92 for its fourth financial quarter of 2014 on Thursday, missing analyst expectations of $11.48bn and an EPS of $0.95. …
This is spot-on. As a fairly large company, we started to evade Oracle wherever technically and operationally possible, even Microsoft starts looking better at the moment and this is no mean feat. Exactly for the reason you so eloquently put. We start to feel the pressure ...down there.
Yep - their boat anchor buisness is being wiped off the map by high end Wintel servers, and their database business is being slowly destroyed by SQL server. Their long standing screwing of their locked in customers for support costs can only add to the mass exodus...
"Unless you are too small to make having an IT support person"
Small business is the only growth area in USA. Small businesses cannot generally afford BOFHs and hence the cloud-based solutions are very appealing.
They might lock you in, but at least they're available. Even people that can do their own BOFHery are using cloud because it is cheaper than doing it yourself.
Some collegues of mine (small company of sub-20 employees) use Amazon VMs when they need some grunt. Why? It is cheaper than buying and maintaining your own.
Oracle sells to corporations, mainly US ones.
Corporate USA (and even corps globally) are generally on the ropes. They are not spending up huge, especially on expensive infrastructure.
No corporate growth --> no corporate IT spend up --> no growth for companies feeding on that.
Where these is some growth in USA is in small businesses. Most of those are going for new cloudy brands for their accounting services etc. They are not installing big iron or using big-iron-think database systems.
Only in the financial crystal ball business is any divergence between forecast and reality considered to be the fault of the company rather than the forecaster.
"Analysts were incorrect" is what this really means, but repeating this too often might cause people to lose confidence in them. (Though thinking about it the Jehovah's Witnesses have predicted the end of the world about six times now, and they are still coming round trying to give out the Watchtower.)
In the USA, there are 'HIPAA' privacy rules, particularly surrounding healthcare information. The big prosecutors in the USA have been quite active prosecuting violations of 'protected health information'.
Caregivers don't want to pay for violations done by their business-partners, so they get agreements from partners to pay the fines IF the partner is the cause.
In my state, Caregivers are sharing that Oracle is not signing such agreements. This is making it easier to choose vendors (or transition to vendors) that sign these agreements.
It is not good for Oracle growth in the Caregiver sector of the economy.
I guess they have a bad reputation now that they killed all FOSS stuff they got when they bought Sun ... FOSS crowd is now looking elsewhere, as they did with SCO, and Novell/Suse - and big companies have freetard^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hcompetent staff in server rooms. They are even actively killing off Solaris....
That and the price hikes (licenses), bad economic situation of big corps ... sad, really, their db is top of the range when you are talking big, critical db.