Oracle support sackings and 'consolidation' almost complete

That they would say this...

Oracle's represented the closure of in-country phone support as a consolidation that will enable better support. Support provided by teams in Egypt, Romania, India and the United States.

I would imagine that the US support group is small and getting smaller. The rest are script monkeys at best. This boggles the mind and given the way companies are cutting costs, it's not surprising. I wonder how many customers will now run for another vendor? And that's probably only if there's another vendor who can provide support and/or a compatible product to transition to.

What a surprise …

Oh look, large company with a vice-like grip on its customers is saving its own money at the expense of its customers. This works as long as customers have no alternative — until they find one.

IBM did the same thing a few years back with what their called GDM, and see where that got them now - 15 quarters in a row of not making their target. I saw it coming, the customers eventually find you out, but it's obvious the bean counters at HQ didn't.

The sad thing is the man who made the call is probably long gone working elsewhere, and sadly he will be bragging on his CV how he saved IBM millions. Pity that the ruining of a good name can't be added to his CV...

Fuck Oracle

That is all

Enjoy the Oracle "Customer Experience"

There is much touting of Oracle's customer experience expertise, but unfortunately that much vaunted technology does not extend to Oracle's own customers.

Basically, in the dash to "cloud," Oracle has jettisoned it's own on-premise products and ancillary services. It will be interesting to see how it turns out.

Fuck Oracle

I've taken a leaf from Cato the Elder's book, and have begun ending all my meetings with "Furthermore, we must move away from Oracle".

tell us about it

take a look at the trouble the Research Councils are currently having with Oracle. Major issues facing their finance, grant proposals, and other systems been ongoing for several weeks now.

Anon for well, reasons

My excompany used to provide support and dev for an extremely complex system that had interfaces with 16 other systems, and had hundreds of thousands of lines source code.

So our client decided that should be made on the cheap, with just two dudes.. and I was the "leader" of the desperate team.

Of course, service was terrible, byt hey, it seemed to be cheap. They lost millions of euros just because of that, but saved a few hundred thousands...

Look; Oracle Does what Oracle Wants.....they dont give a F**K about anyone...EVER

The sooner people realise this the better.....

When Oracle bought Sun, they tried to treat it like the other 50 odd gobble ups.....

They actually didnt care how many ex-Sun customers they p155ed off or got rid of them - there was a percentage plucked out of thin air that as long as they were within - it was just "the spoils of purchasing a company is that you will loose some of that companies customers"....

THEY DONT CARE - THEY ARE NOT INTERESTED.....

Doesnt matter how much we bemoan how crap Oracle are on here or anywhere else....they have contracts that pay BEEELLLIONS of dollars.......and its unlikely that will change anytime soon....

As much as Postgres,etc are taking things over ... its 7 years since Sun were bought by Oracle - and the number of systems out there still running Solaris are still quite significant.....even though Oracle screwed the entire company....

Just think how many implimentations of Oracle DB are out there and how hard it is just to code, test and impliment the change to a single application....

Get real... the timeframes on any significant change to removing Oracle DB are HUGE and at this point, will very likely out-live Larry himself!

MEH....is all I can say.....Oracle are evil and will continue to be....but they know there is nothing anyone can do that wont let them be evil for decades to come.

“consolidation” of support resources [..] Oracle has no comment to make

Funny that. There is not one example of support outsourcing that has brought actual, tangible benefits to customers.

I would have thought that the industry, as a whole, has gone through the call center outsourcing fad and seen the light. Several large companies have declared recreating support centers in-country in the past 18 months. I took that as a sign that this was the end of the fad and things would be set straight again.

I was obviously wrong.

Offshoring Support

Just like to point out that some of this can be explained by the race to the bottom death spiral that is affecting Western Capitalism in general and the IT sector in particular. It goes something like :-

Customer says that he is paying too much for software support. Why should I pay for patches to your badly written software product. It almost encourages you to write bad software and then extort money from me when my business is dependent on it.

So, vendor has to respond by cutting support charges and offshoring costs. It might work out in the long term for the vendor and the client. Customers can respond by going to the cloud (perhaps, if this an option) or by doing what Amazon, Facebook et al do. Roll their own IT using Open Compute hardware and Open source software. Or pay big bucks for someone else to manage it all. If GE can say that moving everything to the Cloud was a huge success (effectively outsourcing a lot of their IT) then who are we to argue. It is pretty rich though for a lot of IT clients to complain about poor support, when that is precisely what they are dishing out to their customers (I'm thinking Banks and public utilities here among others). The only thing on the agenda for most companies today is 'cut costs today and we'll face any music tomorrow - that is if we are even still in business'. If huge banks can do what they are doing their customers and get away with it, then no problems for anyone else then.

It's not just specific to Oracle, it's just that their software is so pervasive (invasive ??) that a lot more people get to notice and voice their discontent.

Problem is ...

... that this doesn't affect the folk that sign the cheques. They aren't the poor buggers trying to get a sensible answer out of Oracle. Nor are they the shmucks ensuring that despite everything the staff and suppliers get paid and management get their pretty charts every month.

And what is the alternative? If you've invested heavily in Oracle applications, what do you do? Sure as hell won't be cheap to move to SAP or Aggresso or Dynamics. Then there's the issue that all of your business processes are based around the Oracle processes. Or have you developed your own apps on a large Oracle database? Do you really want the effort of changing your code to access a different database? In any case, can anyone guarantee that they will always have experienced support consultants based locally?

Finally, if you are large enough to think you need Oracle, you already know that every large organisation will offshore as much as they can to make the most of cheap labour. I mean, all of those large directors' bonuses have to be paid somehow.

And a FWIW - I've been implementing Oracle EBS for over 20 years and have already seen the quality of support diminish. Used to be you'd raise a TAR and actually deal with someone who knew the product. That has changed and as already mentioned, you deal with someone that is following a script and the SR ping-pongs between you until you get to the right page in the script, a light bulb flashed on and they send you a patch. Despite you explaining in minute detail what the problem is and what the likely cause might be at the very outset.

Its not just Oracle shifting jobs offshore.

Australia losing in all areas:

Most IT jobs have been outsourced (Although I hear the Bendigo Bank have no plans to do it, lets all switch bank)

Starter jobs for kids have gone, ie trolley boys, packers, service station attendants.

You here bangon on the TV about ADLI and Costco, both offshore companies which means profits offshore and not stimulating our economy

Note only that, most of our super Is in blue chip companies like Woolies and Wesfarmers, yet ACA give a one sided view that Its better to shop at ALDI or Costco.

We are also selling off Australia, Ive love to see the map of Australia now, must have huge gaping holes in it by now. We'll enjoy a a future where our good farming land with be farmed by others and sent overseas with no regulations, that's ok, cos the ship will be full of second grade food for us to eat.

I dont think we will be able to support the infrastructure in Australia too much longer as know one will have jobs to pay taxes. Hop it doesn't lead us down the path of WWIII